


stars of the inner sea

by Makari Crow (Beanna)



Series: Thy word is a lamp [5]
Category: Fate/Grand Order
Genre: Gilgamesh (Fate) Being an Asshole, M/M, Mutual Pining, that human emotion called friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:54:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22826734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beanna/pseuds/Makari%20Crow
Summary: With Merlin's work done, everything should, in theory, go back to normal. Romani's back in Chaldea, so he and Da Vinci can look after everything there like they're supposed to. Merlin can step out of their lives properly and return to his comfortable isolation, likehe'ssupposed to.It's just... that doesn't seem to be happening, somehow. Da Vinci keeps bothering him, for one thing. And Merlin can't seem to bury the emotions he's definitely not feeling deep enough that they can't grow to the surface.In which Merlin fails to understand the concept of friendship, does some poorly-advised gardening, argues with everyone who will let him -- including a sheep -- and tries to tell himself this is fine.Because it's fine.
Relationships: Merlin | Caster & Leonardo da Vinci | Caster, Romani Archaman/Merlin | Caster
Series: Thy word is a lamp [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1486823
Comments: 31
Kudos: 143





	1. a hazy shade of winter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [purplejabberwock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplejabberwock/gifts).



> Hi all! Fair warning that this is (still) probably not the one you're hoping for, and we need to add slow burn to our taglist somewhere. Let's just say there's a lot of work on the back end to do before we can get the smooching servers up and running, but I promise you they're getting there.
> 
> Watch this space for per-chapter content warnings.
> 
> Also a quick favor, please -- we're not following along with the untranslated stuff, and we know vaguely that there's interesting things going on in the Japanese servers, but we prefer to wait for official localization. Please refrain from posting things past the Lostbelt prologue in the comments -- we'd appreciate it! I'll spare you the metafictional ranting unless you're interested. ; )

**ldavinci:** I see you did take the coward’s way out after all.  
**ldavinci:** Perhaps that’s not fair of me. Certainly you would have complicated things here, as nice as it would have been if you’d stuck around to do that yelling you promised.  
**ldavinci:** But, Merlin...  
**ldavinci:** Are you really all right with this, after all?  
  


Merlin can hear the chime of the instant messenger. He should have closed it down, logged out and uninstalled the program completely. He... meant to. Instead, in a fit of masochism, he set his status to invisible and kept Da Vinci’s window open. It’s a compromise, he tells himself. Between entirely giving up keeping an eye on Chaldea, and staying glued to all the happenings there, stalking the man he resurrected across space and time. Eventually, Da Vinci will get bored of talking to an empty window, and stop giving Merlin updates, and it’ll be a convenient way to stop having any contact at all without having to actually do anything himself. Probably.

He’s really very stupid.  
  


**ldavinci:** Passed his checkup with flying colors, the depth of his magical circuits aside. Congratulations on your fine work!  
  


Merlin ambles off into his inner world, the vast stretch of his dreams, to check on the sheep. It’s still pretty much where he left it, how he left it — adult sheep on the small side, undocked tail, dark brown fleece that’s nearly black, two sets of horns for a grand total of four — two that point up and back, two that curl down and around. “You make a very striking image,” he tells the sheep, which is idly grazing right on the grassy hill he saw it last on.

It lifts its head to eyeball him, as if to establish whether or not he’s serious, and then goes right back to the grass. Merlin can tell where _he_ rates.

Overhead, somewhere in the distant sky, the flower-computer chimes again. Merlin sighs and sprawls backward onto the grass. “I’m ignoring her,” he says to the sheep, confidentially.

It ignores him in turn.

Honestly, Merlin kind of appreciates that. Ignored by his own subconscious. It feels appropriate. He still hasn’t quite wrapped his head around what the sheep means — they’re so often all innocence and sacrifice, and he has none of the former and has turned his nose up at the latter. Something he’s meant to look after and keep safe?

...please. Merlin’s no good at _that_ , either; and if there’s a part of his psyche he’s supposed to be nourishing like a small... thing... then he’s missed the memo entirely, and would probably be operating in blithe opposition anyway.

The sheep’s progression of grazing takes it nearer him, close enough Merlin can hear the crunch of grass very distinctly. Sheepy breath stirs his hair.

It should be a relief to be idle, Merlin thinks. No more hunting through dreams, no more supervising delicate operations half a world and three or four millennia away. Just him and his dreams and the endless march of humanity, dipping in and out of their stories and their fantasies like a cup into a river. Aimless and endless.

The sky chimes again.

Merlin sighs, and wakes himself up to go cling to a crumb of news.  
  


**ldavinci:** Do you mean to stay away forever? I could start to feel insulted, you know.  
  


Merlin makes a face at this, all wrinkled nose and complete lack of amusement. He thought he’d established, well enough, that they’re not friends. He certainly doesn’t care that Da Vinci feels insulted! Or could conceivably feel insulted if he keeps on not responding to her, whatever. There wasn’t any respect there to lose in the first place, and, more importantly — _Merlin doesn’t care._ He just has... echoes of familiarity, from spending so long there. And Da Vinci is pretty vital to Chaldea and its continued operation.  
That’s all it is.  
  


**ldavinci:** I think he’s having a little trouble adjusting.  
**ldavinci:** Well, it’s only been a day or so. Some issues are to be expected. Especially if you’re someone who never expected to have their own life.

  
Merlin tries to figure out if this is intended to be pointed or not. Force of habit means he darts a glance toward Chaldea before he remembers he’s _not doing that_ , and pulls his attention back. All the same he catches a flash or five of cool metal and Da Vinci’s downturned mouth.

 **  
ldavinci:** Did you know he kept the rose?

  
...he hadn’t known, actually. The magic had served its purpose. Merlin had stopped thinking about it. Tentatively he reaches for that sense of himself, of his own created item sitting way down in Antarctica— it’s there, it just feels a little muted. Perhaps because it gorged itself on Romani’s blood and became more of him than of Merlin. That seems like it’s probably fine. Means Merlin doesn’t have to worry about it.

Because he clearly hasn’t learned his lesson from two minutes ago, he looks to see where it is physically— finds flashes of brown skin and a snowfall of white hair, and the sense of Ritsuka’s bounding cheer—

That was a bad idea, judging by the way something in Merlin lurches heavily. He puts the sense of it down and backs away.

 **  
ldavinci:** I don’t know if you meant for that to happen. It’s an interesting piece of magic, though of course I can’t study it properly now. Your skills in item creation aren’t what I typically see.

  
Merlin’s genuinely surprised she didn’t go for an out and out insult. He creates items like he does every other standard magical thing: half-assed and cheating with dreams to make it work.

 **  
ldavinci:** I suppose it’s his now, so if you want it back, you’ll have to fight him for it. And that would be unsporting. If we’re being honest, Romani’s a little bit of a kitten right now.

  
Something horrible and yearning, _wanting_ , yawns in Merlin’s chest. He closes the chat window he wasn’t answering anyway and goes to fling himself into the vast stretches of the human unconscious. It’s interesting, he tells himself. And it is. That’s why he really does love humans, at the end of the day. The stories they tell themselves and each other, the vast endless creativity and determination, the drive that makes them tell the same story over and over with infinite variations until it’s just right— and then start all over again. As if it might turn out this time, as if there will be something different, and then like a miracle there usually is. Humans are like that.

Merlin wanders through their dreams and listens to their stories, fully intending to stay there for a long time, but—

There’s still that damned chiming, even though he would swear he closed the window. Maybe he didn’t exit the program completely. Every time the chime hits his consciousness, Merlin wonders how his work is doing. Da Vinci said he was having trouble adjusting— that’s to be expected! It’s fine! He’s a human being, he’s adaptable, he’ll get there, and there’s no point in expecting everything to be instantly perfect.

Merlin has been staring at a fantastical bank of undersea flowers for a very long time without seeing them. Somewhere off to his right, one of Andersen’s stories is twisting in on itself in new and vivid ways as the dreamer tells it to themself in new ways. Merlin can feel the hope radiating off it from here, painfully pervasive.

He doesn’t have the stomach for grimmer dreams right now, either. Merlin sulks off into the next dream, and the next, leaving flowers in his wake in an increasing array of colors and shapes, bemusing impossible creatures and ordinary humans with morning-glories and lilies-of-the-valley and a wild array of orchids that even the most experimental hothouses have never seen.

Chime.

Chime.

Merlin wakes himself up and goes to see what Da Vinci thinks is so _urgent.  
  
_

**ldavinci:** By the way, I’m setting something up I think you’ll hate.  
**ldavinci:** This script is going to keep notifying you of messages until and unless you answer me. I will admit I’m just guessing here, but I suspect you must have some kind of alert, based on the previous timing of your responses to me in certain situations.  
**ldavinci:** Have fun trying to dismantle it! I’ll be here when you’re ready to talk.

  
Merlin stares at the projected screen with a sense of reluctant admiration. Leonardo da Vinci, genius beyond compare, has put all of her considerable smarts toward _vexing him_ , and it’s _working_. The last message was, in fact, from several hours ago — she’s successfully tricked his computer, which is more than three-quarters dreams and magic and botany, into continuously alerting Merlin that Chaldea exists. That Da Vinci exists, and that Romani Archaman still exists, and if Merlin just _looks..._

With a calm detachment, Merlin plucks the bloom the computer works from and flings it out the window, into Avalon at large.

This may be an overreaction. Oh, well, he can grow a new one, and his password manager is cloud-based anyway. But for now, it’ll be good for him, not to have immediate access and temptation! Sure he’ll miss the cat memes, but there are a hundred hundred dreams of cats and Cats out in the world at any given time _anyway._ It’s not like it’s hard to find entertainment, with clairvoyance and dream-walking as his tools.

From somewhere far below, likely the base of the tower, a faint chime drifts up to Merlin.

 _It has to wilt eventually,_ he thinks to himself— remembers with some distant horror that this is not technically true, that the whole thing could be indefinitely sustained by the sheer force of magic and life that fills the reverse side of the world—

He would fill Da Vinci’s dreams with spiders _if she ever slept._

No, it’s fine. This is fine. It’s like... exposure therapy. Like many humans, Merlin is pretty sure he can get used to anything if he tries hard enough, and anyway he’d meant to sort out which of his stupid lingering feelings are actually his and which are Ritsuka and Mash having committed a contagion on his heart. Eventually the sound will fade into the background of his life, and eventually Da Vinci will get bored. Eventually, anything stupid like _wanting_ will go away.

Merlin sprawls into the corner as far from the offending window as possible, beckons the red fluted blooms of trumpet-flowers in through the _other_ window and twines growing tendrils of the vines around his fingers. Flowers are beautiful, cyclical, and _simple_. Flowers don’t demand Merlin talk to them or be honest with them. And flowers, too, die far sooner than any of those who tend them: but the root remains, and again and again, the flowers bloom once more. Gardeners may love their plants, but they must understand this first of all, or be crushed again and again.

Idly Merlin strokes the petals, affectionate to a thing he won’t need to grieve.

Chime.

All right, fine, Chaldea exists. That doesn’t mean Merlin has to look at it. He runs himself back through all the reasons developing attachments to mortality is something he _doesn’t do._ He’s wholly unsuited to actually looking after anyone; at the end of the day he’s a coward, scared of pain and loss and being known, afraid that anything he lets close enough will eventually catch on to all the reasons Merlin’s in this tower in the first place; he’s functionally immortal, and knows he will be there to watch the last human die, someday in the far distant future. His inactions have been unforgivable and his actions flawed even on those few occasions when they’re selfless. Any relationship, platonic or otherwise, will feature Merlin at a remove, stuck in the between places and weighed down by the various sins of his long history, and honestly nothing’s ever going to get done that way.

Humans are fun and interesting, but they’re not for him. Merlin is outside of humanity, and there’s no getting around that.

Ahhh, but that doesn’t seem to be making a difference to the heavy wanting in his chest. If it were a separate creature Merlin would say it was sulking. As is, he’s pretty sure that it’s just going to take him weeks if not months to examine and properly excise the issues at hand.

—wait, a separate creature? Merlin drags his attention back to that metaphor, thinking now very specifically of a sheep that wandered in from who knows where and now won’t _leave._ He sits upright with narrowed eyes — pauses — leans back against the stone wall and lets himself slip into the realm of his own dreaming subconscious. The chime of Da Vinci’s irritating script follows him all the way down.

The grassy hill has rocks today, and a touch of salt in the air that makes Merlin suspect the hill is now, mysteriously, near the sea. That’s fine, whatever. The sheep is _also_ there, bell quiet around its neck as it idly chews up some more grass. It lifts its head when Merlin comes a little closer, jaw working, a tuft of grass still sticking out of the corner of its mouth.

 _“You,”_ Merlin says, and points a meaningful finger at it with as much sternness as he has in his body.

The sheep stares placidly, unconcernedly at him. It does not appear to be impressed. The tuft of grass slowly disappears into its mouth, bit by bit; eventually, it baas at him, and puts its head back down.

Hm. Maybe it’s not symbolic of what he thought it was. Merlin plops down on the grass closer to it, spreading his robe out across the dew-damp blades. “I have to wonder,” he says to it, as if it will answer. “Are you the same sheep I saw in David’s dream? And if you are, did you come from me and travel with me, or did you follow me home? And if you followed me home, _why are you still here?_ ”  
In the distance of the steady gray sky, the chime prods at the edges of his consciousness. Merlin is not so far gone as to make rude gestures at the sky, but honestly, it’s getting to be a near thing.

The sheep remains unimpressed. It rips up some more grass, making this, too, vanish. In its own time, long after Merlin has finished his questions and sulkily resigned himself to no answers, as per usual, the sheep ambles over and settles beside him, half on the grass and half on the edge of his robe. It tucks its legs up under it, making a tidy sheeploaf, and gives Merlin a look. If he had to ascribe an emotion, it would be speculative.

“No,” he says, “my hair is not rainbow grass.”

The sheep doesn’t go anywhere, but at least it doesn’t start trying to chew on his hair or his robe. So that’s nice. Merlin tilts his head back to consider the gray sky — it’s the heavy, even gray of a cold winter day, when the sun means to set early and rain might darken the air without the slightest provocation. “Should I be taking something away from all this?” he asks idly.

Nothing changes. Answers do not come from sky or sheep or distant salt-sea. Behind the clouds, again, the chime.

He should probably get a start on that emotional examination he’s really, definitely meaning to do. It’s just... where does he even _start?_ Not to mention that sorting out which feelings are his will require Merlin to acknowledge he has any of those at all, which he prefers not to do on the best of days. For the most part, he just stashes all his emotions around here somewhere, deep and buried, and figures eventually he won’t have to deal with them any more.

“Ahh, don’t make me go spelunking,” he tells the sheep. “Well. All right. There’s one easy thing. Ritsuka and Mash, they look up to him, right? Like family. Like a _dad_. It’s sweet, but I’ve never felt that way about anyone in my life. So I can rule out anything sitting on _that_ shelf.” Slowly, carefully, Merlin dares to press his thoughts around the tangled mass of emotions — the ones he isn’t having. Those emotions. He thinks—

He remembers some of this. Ritsuka’s definitely left the brightest burn, with that wild passionate enthusiasm she applies to just about everything. Merlin feels around the edges tentatively, eyes half-closed and the scent of sheep in his nose, and compares Ritsuka’s earnest heart with the pretty things he had spun together with his subconscious, down in those caves— raw and reaching, the fiercely edged sense of wanting to pull something close to him and refuse to let go, compared to the brighter, earnest faith Ritsuka carries like a sword.

All right, like this he can definitely see the difference. It doesn’t necessarily make the other things go away — but there’s a sense like he can separate from that bright faith, and keep for himself only that which is his, as painful as that might be. Mentally Merlin tries to at least put them on different shelves in the same heart, which ... doesn’t seem to quite stick _immediately_ , but it’s an effort worth making and—

Chime.

That is frankly enough of that. Merlin catapults himself out of dreams — the sheep makes a startled sort of baa as he passes — and starts, with some intent frustration, to re-grow a computer for himself from the vine that bloomed the last one. It’s not so hard — the plant already has the idea and Merlin knows what he’s doing — but it takes time. Time in which Merlin’s heart throbs like a wounded thing, like simply unearthing ideas to look at them has undone all his hard work at repression from earlier. Time in which the flower down below _keeps chiming at him._

He’ll give her this, Da Vinci is definitely a genius. An _evil_ genius.

After frankly far too many repetitions of insistent distant chiming, Merlin has windows projected in varying shades of fuchsia, password manager accessed and a system reinstall done while he does a lot of sweet-talking to convince every piece of software ever written that he has wire and silicon, not plants and magic. The wifi is still fine, though. His ‘router’ is something else entirely. He gets the messenger open, prepared for whatever Da Vinci’s left him, and— there’s nothing. It’s just her script. Along this length of time, it’s just been that.

When he’s stared at the empty box long enough, it rattles and flares red at him, chiming aggressively. Merlin tells himself he doesn’t have to answer it. He’s not eager for news. He can go look at videos of kittens instead. Kittens are great, and videos of them doubly great because they don’t _bite him_ like _some_ animals he could name. He can get used to the chiming.  
He discovers some several minutes later that Da Vinci’s script pops the messenger window to the front of whatever he’s doing.  
  


**sagerose:** fine, look at me, i’m responding!  
  


Merlin considers it a mark of how successful Da Vinci’s irritation scheme is that he didn’t think of manually adjusting settings in the messenger until later, but— oh. Ah. He sees. The messenger Chaldea uses internally doesn’t have a function to disable alerts entirely, and while he can mute this computer at the system level, he can’t adjust the volume settings on the flower down below now, because he’s actually a complete fool. This is fine. At least the thing stops chiming for many long, blessed minutes. Merlin settles down in his corner against the wall, head tilted back, and breathes.

He couldn’t say how long it is later that Da Vinci gets back to him, but eventually the chime from down below alerts him to the fact that the muted one in his lap is blinking at him.

 **  
ldavinci:** Ah, there you are! I have to say, I expected that to take longer.

 **sagerose:** bite me.

  
As soon as he’s typed it, Merlin knows it was a bad idea, the hint that she’s getting to him escaping out where she can see it and breaking the illusion of the un-invested cambion who doesn’t actually feel anything deeply at all. He crooks a finger through the screen and convinces the computer that he didn’t type it, erasing the last few seconds from the server.

 **  
ldavinci:** I did see that, Merlin.  
**ldavinci:** As friendly as we are, I don’t care to speculate on your kinks right now.

  
Excellent, Merlin thinks, he’s made it worse. He thumps his head back against the stone. He swears he used to be better than this at lying. Used to have entire courts convinced he cared for nothing but troublemaking. These days, one Italian genius looks at him and sees, apparently, everything.

This is why it would have been a better idea to cut ties and hunker down to wait out the century in miserable resignation. How is he so _stupid_?  
  


**ldavinci:** Out of curiosity, do you know what day it is?  
  


Merlin sighs, and answers her, since there’s really no point in putting it off when she’ll just keep nagging him anyway. The sooner answered, the sooner done.  
  


**sagerose:** you know i can just look at the timestamps, right? that’s not the gotcha you think it is.

 **ldavinci:** Ah, but you have to look at the timestamps in the first place!  
  


He grimaces at the screen. It’s true, though; his sense of time has gotten worse, not better, in Avalon. Before he can say anything in his defense, though, Da Vinci keeps typing, and Merlin isn’t about to volunteer more information to hang himself with at this point.  
  


**ldavinci:** So! Just to catch you up: It’s been two full days and change.  
**ldavinci:** Romani slept a lot the first night, which is probably good for him. I assume he would have said something confused if you’d visited him?  
**ldavinci:** He’s reacclimating. The girls are trying not to push him too hard.  
**ldavinci:** Have you seen what he looks like now, or did you vanish too soon?

 **sagerose:** i had a glimpse. more Solomon than anything else, right? ahhhh, i wish i’d thought to have you grab a hair sample from his old brush or something.

 **ldavinci:** I am noting and moving on from your thing for redheads!  
  


Merlin begins to seriously consider the concept of pitching this computer out the window as well. It wouldn’t help, but it would feel satisfying for at least a solid minute, and he could then pretend he’d done something useful.  
  


**ldavinci:** You’ll have to take a closer look sometime, though. You might be surprised.  
**ldavinci:** There was a bad turn with Lobo last night, but he’s safe and appears to be working toward grieving in a slightly healthier way than anything James Moriarty has ever touched.  
  


What does she mean by _he’ll have to take a closer look sometime_ — oh, a transparent ploy to get Merlin to look in on Chaldea. To her credit, Merlin does think about it, thinks about looking that way or slipping a dream of himself in among the staff just to see. Since she hasn’t told him what differences there might be, what things of Doctor Roman might have lingered in the remade man, Merlin itches with curiosity near immediately.

She _is_ good.  
  


**ldavinci:** I may be telling you things you already know— I confess, I’m not certain if you’re keeping an eye on us or not.

 **sagerose:** i’m not.

 **ldavinci:** A lady could feel slighted by your blatant lack of concern, you know!  
  


Merlin doesn’t have a good answer for that. His heart’s not in the banter, he realizes with some alarm. He wonders what happened with Lobo; he wants to see that Romani’s... safe. Not more traumatized than he already is. He wants to see that all his hard work is undamaged, he argues with himself, and it rings sinkingly hollow even in the silence of his tower with no one but himself to judge its worth.

 **  
ldavinci:** Oh, but Merlin... don’t forget, you made certain promises.

 **sagerose:** ?  
**sagerose:** what promises were those?

 **ldavinci:** I’m sure you told at least one of us that after your current project was done, you’d revisit allowing yourself to be summoned to Chaldea.

 **sagerose:** oh, that!  
**sagerose:** i revisited the idea and my assessment was it’s not happening.

  
There’s a telling pause from the other end. Merlin resolutely resists the urge to look at her face, and instead pokes around to see if he can at least change what sound the messenger alert makes. ...Ah, he could make it quack like a duck. Honestly, he thinks that might be worse. He leaves it alone, resigning himself to chimes.  
  


**ldavinci:** It’s interesting that that’s your assessment!  
**ldavinci:** Well, the girls are distracted with looking after Romani for now, of course, but I wouldn’t estimate you have long before one of them remembers she wants to hug you.  
**ldavinci:** And while it may not have come up yet that you were able to manifest yourself during the great rescue operation— frankly, I don’t see that I have a need to conceal any of that information, if I’m asked.  
  


At least Merlin knows better than to actually tell her that he’s pretty sure Ritsuka and Mash don’t have a way to contact him in this tower. At best, that’ll remind Da Vinci to give them access to instant messaging with him; at worst, he’ll wind up with three sets of irritating chimes refusing to let him have a moment’s peace.  
  


**ldavinci:** Would you like to know anything specific about how things are going here?

 **sagerose:** really? not going to try to blackmailing me into showing up?

 **ldavinci:** I’ll answer one question before beginning my extortion!  
  


It’s so, so tempting. That’s how the fae get you, Merlin thinks dryly to himself, and drums his fingers against his knee. One thing. One question, which will let Da Vinci get an idea of his priorities and tempt him with the idea of more knowledge if he’ll only reach a little further, a little further still, until he’s fallen into Chaldea’s gravity and can’t get out again.  
  


**sagerose:** nah, no questions! i’m fine here.

 **ldavinci:** Oh, Merlin.

 **sagerose:** what?  
  


She doesn’t answer him. Merlin begins to think that was an exasperated sigh of a response, rather than the precursor to needing to tell him something else. At least he has some additional quiet; and it feels like a long time before another message comes through.  
  


**ldavinci:** Nothing.  
**ldavinci:** You could always look in yourself, you know.

 **sagerose:** i don’t need to. congratulations, you saved the world and all of human history, and reclaimed one of your lost ducklings besides!  
**sagerose:** there’s no need for me to be involved any more.  
**sagerose:** i can tell you if another catastrophe is impending, though!

 **ldavinci:** We have Chaldeas for that, and it’s still perfectly functional. Although I appreciate the thought!  
**ldavinci:** Consider this a warning, then, if that suits you better.  
**ldavinci:** Running away doesn’t work when your pursuers know exactly where to find you.  
**ldavinci:** Also, that script is still running! You’ll have twenty minutes to respond to me at any given time before it starts up again.  
**ldavinci:** Look at it this way. At least you’ll be guaranteed the last word in all of our conversations!  
  


Merlin groans and resolves to start on finding that damned script or at least counteracting it first thing, as soon as she stops bothering him. This has gone from amusing to— something worse. Not painful. Just heavy, and pressing.  
  


**ldavinci:** I’ll keep you posted. Good night, Merlin.

 **sagerose:** good night, Leonardo.  
  


She doesn’t answer him, and there’s blessed silence. Merlin lets his breath out slow and careful in the stillness, and then goes to sprawl himself out face-down on the floor. No one can see him to tell him how pathetic this is, for one thing, and the cool stone is nice against his cheek. And it’s fitting, anyway. He keeps tripping himself into making things worse for himself, like an absolute idiot desperate for any shred of human contact.

There’s no avoiding that she’s going to keep updating him on what’s going on down there, is there? Merlin turns his head the other way on the floor, closing his eyes and thinking through priorities. If Da Vinci’s set on that, then his first step in disentangling from all the people in Chaldea who think he’s their friend is going to have to be either inuring himself to the distant instant-messenger chime which he’s fast become hyper-alert to, or disabling the script she’s set up to consistently remind him of her messages.

For now he’s going to lie on the floor some more. He’s got a little self-pity to catch up on.

Merlin sulks for at _least_ five minutes, probably more — however long it is until he gets bored of that. It’s short enough, anyway, that Da Vinci doesn’t feel the need to update him about local happenings even once. Eventually he rouses himself, rubs his face, and starts to poke around in the petals for whatever she’s done to his computer.

A little work digs up that she hasn’t managed to load any foreign files on his flower. It _looks_ like what’s happening is she’s actually made her own terminal query again and again, with a little added hijacking of the messenger window — making her settings override his own, he thinks. Effective, annoying, and most importantly not somewhere Merlin can really reach without interacting with her. He’d have to modify Da Vinci’s computer in order to get rid of it.

...He _could_ just block her, probably. The function exists in most instant messaging clients, including this one. It would neatly null all messages from her, at least until she wised up to what he’d done and borrowed another or created a sock puppet to talk to him from an unblocked account. All the same, it would give him at least a day, maybe more, of peace to start unpicking the contagious attachments Ritsuka and Mash had tried to give him.

Why is he not doing that?

Merlin genuinely doesn’t know. He has the button right there. He could just... stop Da Vinci from messaging him at all. Test if she's thought this far ahead.

He doesn’t touch the button.

It doesn’t feel like yearning. It’s a dull sort of beating in his chest, something low and sick and nauseating. He _could_ make a decent try at cutting contact, and he doesn’t. He won’t. He lives for pain, apparently.

Merlin closes the whole thing to test if shutting down the flower will work, mentally curses the inventors of the internet in general, and goes off to roll in the grass next to a sheep again.

The hill is still there, appealingly covered in grass and a faint beading of dew. The sky is a variety of shades of dark blue, and there’s a hint on the distant horizon of something lighter, like the sun might later bother to rise there, but mostly the light comes from the constellations overhead, the violet and unfeeling crescent moon. The sheep... isn’t there.

...weird.

Merlin can’t hear its bell ringing, though, so he assumes it’s not getting into trouble he wouldn’t want it to, and he absolutely doesn’t have the level of care necessary to go and find where it’s gotten off to. He flings himself facedown in the grass instead, which is a vast improvement over stone. It gives just a little under him, soft and velvety until a grass blade goes up his nose and Merlin sneezes in brief abject misery. Apart from that hiccup it’s a nice place to be. He dozes there, half-conscious within his own dream, letting his mind wander aimlessly through colors and ideas. He bounces off walls of emotions more often than he’d like, even in pointless daydreaming about sunsets and flowers and orchestras. It’s frankly ridiculous.

He’s alerted to the sheep’s presence very belatedly. Like before, its footsteps don’t have very much sound to them, and it only seems to smell of sheep when Merlin’s actively expecting it. Instead what attracts Merlin’s attention is that the sheep has dropped something into the grass next to him, and that makes a sound. Only afterward does the idea of frankincense and sheep hit his nose.

For several moments Merlin doesn’t actually move, reluctant to look at what this subconscious construct has brought him. No one thing really changes his mind, only the passage of time with nothing else happening, and finally the decision that he actually is curious and wants to know what’s going on there. Carefully Merlin sits up, and finds the sheep laying down in the grass, legs tucked up, next to a heavy chunk of either crystal or ice.

Definitely ice, Merlin determines in the next few moments, as he shakes his fingers out. He breathes on his fingertips to chase the sudden burning chill of it away, and tries again to pick up the ice-chunk, this time with his sleeve as insulation. Somehow, he’s entirely unsurprised to find it’s shaped like a rose, one that under his fingers threads through with color, the bright pink of fuchsia ribboned through with the sharp crimson of fresh blood.

It looks like the flower he gave to Mash. The one she then gave to Romani.

“You’re not funny,” he tells the sheep. “Why this?”

He barely has to think to sort meaning out of it. The flower symbolism is obvious, for one thing, as is the thing he used the mirror of this rose to do; and it hurts to touch. Wow. So subtle, subconscious. It’s the second layer that gives him pause. Yes, there’s obviously meaning, but what is it trying to _tell_ him? What is he trying to tell _himself_ , here? If it’s ‘don’t touch that, idiot,’ he’s been over that, and has determined that his lamentable masochism is making it hard not to. Merlin’s never been the person not to touch.

“Why don’t you come with a user’s manual?” he asks the sheep next. It puts its head down and makes every appearance of going to sleep, but Merlin can answer that question himself. It’s because people are complicated, emotions are complicated, and Merlin himself doesn’t have a manual.

He does note that the icy flower isn’t leaving any dampness on his sleeves where he holds it. That’s interesting. Even though he must be transmitting warmth at least a little, even though ice will naturally develop condensation in almost any non-freezing situation, it isn’t melting, just radiating chill. Which means…

“This is stupid,” Merlin complains, and flops over backward, flower still in his outstretched hand and dully exuding cold through the barrier of cloth.

“So are you, but you don’t hear me complaining.” The voice sounds familiar, given that it’s pretty much Merlin’s, but it’s not him speaking; and in the next moment a face leans into view over Merlin, dangling a braided rope of hair off to one side, much the same myriad lack of color as his own.

The face is his, Merlin’s pretty sure, though he doesn’t spend enough time looking at his reflection to be sure about the finer details — maybe the angles are sharper, maybe they’re not. The eyes are slit-pupiled and the violet in them eclipses the sclera completely, so that’s not a great sign. And then there’s the horns. They’re pretty much identical to the ones on the sheep next to him — ridged and black, two pointing sharply back, two curving around and down as if to frame his ears.

They look difficult to sleep on, Merlin manages to think, with a thin layer of something that definitely isn’t fear coating the whole flip train of thought. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just him, after all.

“I’m sure you complain all the time,” Merlin says, with a false cheer that gets realer and realer as he goes with it. “I just don’t hear you.” Honestly, it just wastes time, going over the litany of his own flaws more than once or twice. He’s got the list, he stores it in a safe place, he takes it to heart.

“Ah, maybe so,” the other part of him says, noncommittally. He sits down somewhere beside Merlin, and Merlin turns his head just enough so that he can eyeball the showboat of an incubus. “There’s plenty of places here where it’s too quiet to hear.”

It’s an innocuous nothing phrase, but it sends something cold down Merlin’s spine for a split second anyway, thinking of quiet places: the woods, the stone, the knife glinting dully in his hand and the stupid, stupid sheep offering itself up, and the knowledge that whatever got left there would stay there, one way or another. Plants, too, grow best on blood and bone.

Merlin puts that way the fuck aside and eyeballs himself. “I hate what you’ve done with the shape,” he says conversationally. “How can anyone see if you’re rolling your eyes without whites?”

“I think you’ll find I have an expressive face,” the other Merlin says, and rolls his eyes to demonstrate. Damn him, he’s right. “It’s all part and parcel down here. You know, if you were serious about reminding people you’re a demon, there are easier ways to do it than constantly telling them you can’t feel things.”

“I can feel things,” Merlin corrects automatically. “Just not with the same strength and attachment humans do. Like an attachment to characters in a book. It’s nice, but it doesn’t last, and it doesn’t…”

The other Merlin raises sarcastic eyebrows. Merlin stops. “Yeah,” the other says. “Don’t try that on me, me.”

Merlin doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have anything to fill in. Just a quiet, nagging wondering. This version of himself, this construct-avatar, this _filing system_ — it’s never come to him before. It always peels out of his dreams and memories when he goes to poke at them on purpose, but when Merlin’s just flirting on the surface without really venturing down into deep review or the wonderland of grief and war waiting to ambush him… Never. Never once.

The incubus-shaped Merlin runs a hand along one of his own curved horns, fingers dragging slow like a lover’s caress on flesh instead of keratin. “What do you think?” he asks, and his tone is almost mocking. “I’m thinking rings, but I haven’t decided what color metal.”

Something curdles, nauseating in Merlin’s gut, and he doesn’t entirely know why. “Silver,” he says, and his glibness comes out brittle. “Gold’s too yellow for me, especially right up near your face like that.”

“Hmmm,” says the other Merlin, and then there are rings there, banding the curve of horn. Not quite silver, Merlin sees, but a pale, fine gold, something that shines without being colorless. “Electrum, I think. That’s better.”

Merlin doesn’t like any of this, and he can’t nail down why. He chews on his tongue for a few moments. “Not going in for gems?”

“Nah,” the other one says. “I think that’d cross the line into gaudy. I still have taste, you know?”

Personally, Merlin’s taste involves a riot of color and just enough white to balance it out and provide the eye a resting place. Maybe that’s why it’s bothering him. Sure, all his reasons to dislike himself are rattling around down in here somewhere, and sure, his relationship with this construct hasn’t ever been what he’d call _harmonious_ — probably says something about his attitudes toward himself, but that’s not new — but this is a different sort of straight-out ignoring Merlin.

He definitely doesn’t like it.

“Anyway, I just came to say hi,” the incubus-Merlin says, getting up again. He towers over Merlin like this, with Merlin still sprawled on the hill. Merlin wonders — is he taller now? Does he want to find out? “And to grab this from you.”

The other Merlin stoops then, and Merlin realizes what he’s going for too late to stop it. In a moment the iced-over rose is gone from his sleeved grip, and Merlin wiggles his chilled fingers with some alarm. “H-hey,” he says, sitting up in an instant. “I was going to…”

“Going to what?” the other one says. He turns the rose over in his bare hands, without even a hint that it bothers him.

“…look at that more?” Merlin tries. There’s a chill down his spine again, and this time it isn’t going away.

The other Merlin tosses it in the air, and then pockets it, shrugging with a liquid sort of grace. “I’ll handle it,” he says. “It’s nothing to worry about.” And then he starts walking away down the hill.

Merlin scrambles to his feet, suddenly feeling very ungraceful and very human by contrast. “I’m done with it when I say I’m done with it, and not before,” he says, immediately striding after.

“Sure weren’t acting like you wanted it,” the other Merlin tosses over his shoulder. Improbably, his strides lengthen— Merlin quickens his own pace— and then they’re down the hill and Artoria’s England begins to rise up around them, the village and the people and in the distance always the stone, the Sword of Selection, the moment frozen in time where Merlin ruins everything.

Merlin’s step hitches, as it often does. A woman he vaguely remembers cuts between him and his demonic mirror, and then Merlin’s attention is caught by someone short and blonde — not Artoria, not down here, but he had to look, he always looks — and when he manages to haul his attention back, the other Merlin is just gone.

He should be happier about this than he is. The filing system worked. The thing that hurts to touch, hurts to look at, is stashed down in the depths of his subconscious, somewhere safe he doesn’t have to think about it. Surely Merlin can’t actually have wanted to thaw it back down to something warm and growing, hold it close and safe. That would be stupid.

That doesn’t mean he wanted the choice taken out of his hands — literally — either.

_Sure weren’t acting like you wanted it._

“I’m a masochist, all right?” he says to the crowd at large, feeling whiny about the whole thing. “I admit it, I’m guilty, I like the pain. I wanted to touch it more so I could make sure it still hurt. Are you happy now?”

No one turns to look at him. No answers are given to him.

Something steps on his foot.

Merlin looks down to see the sheep. He is less surprised by this than he wishes he was. It’s standing on his foot, which is the only surprising part, and looking up at him, actively demanding attention in this way instead of just existing near him and being a sheep. He’d swear it looks reproachful.

Maybe that’s projecting. Maybe the ridiculous ungulate is part of him after all, not shepherd contagion. Merlin doesn’t _know_ , and he _should_ know.

Such is tradition: clairvoyants are blindest about themselves. When the world stretches out before, who bothers to look down?

The sheep shifts its weight off his foot, apparently specifically so it can step on his toe again, tangible even through the boot. It bleats, just once, a low pathetic request of a thing.

“Ugh,” Merlin says. “Get off my foot and I’ll go see if I can find it.”

It does so. Merlin considers turning around… no, he’s nettled too, more than just the sheep. “You’re answering Da Vinci for me if she decides she wants my attention while we’re at this,” he warns the sheep, and stomps off toward the memories of his horrible choices.  
About four stomps in it occurs to him that stomping makes it obvious he’s upset, and he modulates his stride, but he’s still sulking in his heart.

The sheep follows.


	2. paint your faith on the wall

Up by the stone, Artoria sets her hand to Caliburn and pulls. Half-free, the moment freezes, captured in perfect relief. Merlin watches. He knows the words they say by heart. He’s been over them, again and again. Nothing ever changes here. Nothing _can_ change.

Artoria chooses.

Merlin honors that choice.

When the moment is done being shown to him, Merlin sticks his hand out and wiggles his fingers, beckoning to the hazy image of himself. “Hey. _Hey_.”

The construct of Merlin turns its head toward him, slips from Merlin-shaped to that very unsubtle wrongness in the space of a blink and a breath. “Hey yourself,” he says, and laughs at his own joke.

“Yeah,” Merlin says. “Right, something like that. Give me the rose, all right? I wanted to look at that.”

The other Merlin shrugs. “Stashed it.”

Merlin regards himself with something distinctly less than fondness. “Unstash it.” He wiggles the fingers on his extended hand for punctuation. “That’s mine.”

“I’m you,” the other one says. “I stashed it for you. Because you didn’t want it.”

This is unbelievable. Merlin’s having an argument _with himself_. “You’re the worst,” he says, smiling and friendly. “Fine, where’d you put it?”

“I _am_ ,” the other Merlin agrees, displaying fifteen hundred years’ worth of issues in a bare two words. It’s masterful, really. “I dunno. Around.”

“What is the _point_ of you?” Merlin demands. His face is hot, his heart loud in his ears. This is worse than anger— this is frustration at something he can’t control, something that isn’t _responding_ to him.

This is _him_ , this shouldn’t be happening. He’s the master of his own inner realm, at the end of the day, mysterious caches of self-loathing and hard-on for punishment aside. He’s completely serious and earnest, he actually does want to get a look at whatever it was the sheep brought him and his other self — his inner self — _this_ — is trying to hide.

And his mind, the composition of himself, is disobeying him.

“That’s a good question,” the other Merlin says, all slow and low. “What _is_ the point of me?”

Merlin is _not_ having an existential crisis on account of _one man_ , no matter what hoops he jumped through to re-life that man in the first place. “To watch and wait,” he says, trying to rein at least his own part in. “To see. And, at least on _your_ part, to help me keep track of all the things down here, not _hide_ them.”

“Hmh,” the other one says, not sounding fully convinced. “If you say so. Anyway, it’s around here somewhere.” He sweeps his arm wide, a broad display of cloth and wind. “I’m sure I’ll remember where I put it eventually.”

That is, one hundred percent, the absolute opposite of helpful.

“How about now, instead,” Merlin says, pushing at his own boundaries with a grim, concerted sort of determination.

The other him shrugs again. “Don’t feel like it.”

_Don’t feel like it_. Don’t _feel_ like it. “You’re _me_ ,” Merlin objects. “And I want to know where that is so I can look at it.”

“Sounds like you should start looking for it, then,” the other Merlin says, hands in his pockets now. He looks human, now, only in the most general sense; this is Merlin reflected through the incubus mirror, all sharpness and distinctly demonic sex appeal. “If we’re the same, then you can find it just as well as I can.”

Merlin doesn’t have anything to say to that. It’s… sort of true. It is true. He just… doesn’t want to do the work of sorting through all the things he’ll have to at least look at to see if the rose is hiding under them. Why can’t he outsource that to his subconscious?

Because apparently some part of him he wasn’t even really aware of is in out-and-out revolt. That’s great. Also, horrifying. A lot of what Merlin does relies on his control of himself, if not his sense of himself. If this is a thing that’s happening now…

Well, he’s going to need to patch it up, probably, and since the issue started with the rose — he thinks — then that’s where _he_ needs to start. He turns a hopeful eye on the other version of himself, wondering if that much need to find the thing will be enough to change his — own — mind? No. No, that’s still a remarkably unimpressed look.

On a quick whim, Merlin checks for the sheep, remembering it’s got the same horns as the incubus-image. Ah— no, there it is, a few paces away nibbling not on the grass, but on the stone itself. Do sheep do that? Merlin has honestly no idea, and he’s not in the mood for sheep research. He does a quick visual check to make sure it still has the bell on and looks back at himself.

Still there. Still tauntingly bedazzled in horns and shining rings.

As he already knows that any variant on _fuck you_ , while temporarily satisfying to his frustration, will inevitably end with innuendo and masturbation, Merlin closes his teeth on any number of imprecations and stalks off past the other him, down the other side of the hill where he’ll find the rich and deservedly unplumbed depths of himself. He refuses to look back to see if he has company. He doesn’t _want_ any.

Fittingly, frustratingly, halfway down the hill he becomes conscious of a distant chiming. It may or may not have been going on for a while; all he knows is that it is now impossible to ignore. Merlin stops, debating. If he goes far enough into his own mind and consciousness, can he ignore that sound completely?

The sheep comes from beside him around to in front of him, staring up at him. Merlin makes a disapproving face at it. “I thought I said I was going to make you answer that next time it happened,” he says.

It flickers its ears and then lies down where it is, legs tucked up under it, otherwise impassive. “Oh,” Merlin says. “Are you going to keep my place? That’s considerate, but I haven’t gotten very far yet.” He stops himself from glancing back over his shoulder to check for the shadow of himself. Never a good plan, looking back. “I still think it’d be funnier the other way. You can just type ‘baa’ a lot and confuse Da Vinci, it’ll be great.” It occurs to Merlin that he, too, is entirely capable of doing this, and he may even invest in it as an offputting measure. His argument sure hasn’t moved the sheep at all.

“Fine,” Merlin says with a sigh, and kicks himself back into the waking realm in Avalon to go and see what Leonardo da Vinci wants _this_ time, since she’s managed to _wake his flower up_ to bother him.  
  


**ldavinci:** This is your daily check-in!   
**ldavinci:** It’s still well below freezing outside Chaldea, but inside is seasonable for human habitation.   
**ldavinci:** Local time really doesn’t matter all that much, but I’m awake and many other people are asleep, how’s that?   
**ldavinci:** Romani had a fitting for new clothes today. Later, we may even try lunch in public!   
**ldavinci:** Come on, Merlin, I know you haven’t disabled my tricks that quickly.  
  


She’s right, but that doesn’t mean she has to lord it over him. Merlin waits through several more rounds of pinging, specifically so he doesn’t look eager. The thought emerges, once, while he’s waiting — perhaps Da Vinci would have insight about subconscious constructs gone rogue.

Merlin squashes _that_ one in a hurry. There’s no one else in the world who’s likely to be quite as good at finagling their way through dreams and consciousness as Merlin is, and he and his ego know that intimately well. And _that_ means the vague thought of talking to Da Vinci about what’s happening in his head is just the shadow of a want to reach out for human contact. Shared troubles are halved, or something like that.

No. He wouldn’t have gone into details about this sort of thing with any of those he knew back in Artoria’s time, and he’s certainly not about to get into it with Da Vinci. He doesn’t have friends to share troubles with, and she’s definitely not one of them, because, as mentioned, he’s not capable of friendship.

He’s not. He _isn’t_.  
  


**sagerose:** sunny as ever here! what do you want.

**ldavinci:** To remind you that we exist, of course!   
**ldavinci:** Also, to let you know Romani’s probably going to look very good when he has clothes that fit him properly. The way you put him back together, he doesn’t fit almost any of the clothes he had in his other body.   
**ldavinci:** Oh, but he’s decided to cut his hair. Soon.

**sagerose:** what a shame for the girls.

**ldavinci:** Isn’t it just! Oh, well. I’m sure you’ll think he’s cute just the same.  
  


Why is she _like this_. Merlin holds his hands in place by sheer virtue of will, refusing to type any number of unwise things. He restrains himself so well and so long, in fact, that Da Vinci’s script rattles the chat window at him. Merlin hisses — realizes he should be striving _not_ to emulate Cath Palug — types a precise and polite answer.  
  


**sagerose:** haha, i don’t know why you’d think that.   
**sagerose:** was that everything? i was in the middle of something.

**ldavinci:** You’re a terrible liar.  
  


Merlin freezes again, thinking through what she might possibly be trying to call him on. —anyway, she has to be just bluffing, he realizes a few moments later. Bluffing, and hoping to hit a mark. She’s not even looking at him, how could she possibly tell he’s lying about anything.  
  


**sagerose:** i really don’t know what you’re talking about! seriously, was that everything?

**ldavinci:** Hmmm. No, not quite.   
**ldavinci:** I take it you still haven’t taken a look over here, then?  
  


For the benefit of himself and only himself, Merlin tosses his hands in the air for a moment.  
  


**sagerose:** it’s really obvious you want me to creep on the guy, you know. isn’t that a little weird?

**ldavinci:** Merlin, you’re the ultimate voyeur.   
**ldavinci:** In any case, weird is the least of the things I’ve been called, and I wear it proudly!   
**ldavinci:** You didn’t say no.

**sagerose:** i haven’t looked at Chaldea since i left, honestly, and i don’t plan to. there’s only so much i should interfere, and you’re all doing very well on your own, judging by how the entire world is still here!   
**sagerose:** whatever schemes you’re up to, they have gone unwitnessed.

**ldavinci:** As if I’d have schemes!   
**ldavinci:** Please. I have only careful plans.   
**ldavinci:** That wasn’t it, anyway. While I really do think you and Romani should talk, whether it’s before or after he gets an account of your pining in the command room from any of the staff,

**sagerose:** i wasn’t pining!

**ldavinci:** I was more interested in you seeing how he’s doing. There’s things he won’t show me, you know. Being brought back to life can’t be an easy thing.   
**ldavinci:** I’m not going to dignify that with an argument.

**sagerose:** ask Gilgamesh or something, i’m sure if you phrase it right he’ll be happy to be self-important about it.   
**sagerose:** i’m honestly surprised you’d ask. unless this is part of your master plan to get the ship going.

**ldavinci:** Oh, that’s between the two of you. I’m not interfering with that, or telling you what to do one way or another, beyond strongly advocating that you should talk to each other honestly and openly.   
**ldavinci:** But! I am inclined to do some ethical gymnastics if that’s what’s required to make sure my dearest friend survives his resurrection.

Of all the things, that’s what most makes Merlin nearly look. He feels vaguely the distant sense of the rose when he turns his attention that way, and it would be so easy to just look — check in on Romani in relative privacy, and who knows if he’s clairvoyant enough now to sense when he’s being watched — but Merlin does nothing.

Da Vinci would tell him. He thinks.  
  


**sagerose:** …is it that bad, really?

**ldavinci:** Hm.   
**ldavinci:** Well. Perhaps I’m exaggerating. But I was in no way joking about the incident with Lobo. Romani has a lot of adjusting to do, shall we say.   
**ldavinci:** And he is of course well taken care of, and I am not at this moment genuinely concerned for his life.   
**ldavinci:** But it isn’t easy for him, and I suspect it is in fact harder than he will let on to anyone.  
  


And Merlin thinks of messages sent to Magi*Mari, of late-night desperations and Romani so insistent that he couldn’t do this, that he was a coward, that he was too afraid to do what must be done.

He thinks of a man who, nevertheless, smiled in his last moments. Smiles like that… ah, they cut through everyone who sees them. Merlin holds that memory close.

Because it’s an important record. Not because…

Well. Not because of anything at all except the importance of bearing witness. That’s all it is, for sure.

Anyway.  
  


**sagerose:** give him a little more credit, you know?   
**sagerose:** as much as it pains me to say this, the power of friendship will see you all through! trust me on this, i stuck my fingers in all of those pies. the way you all care about him and he cares about you, it’s strong. way too strong for me!   
**sagerose:** but i’ve watched humans long enough to know what’s what with that.   
**sagerose:** if you’re still worried in a week or two, ask again and i might reconsider.   
**sagerose:** might. i’m pretty sure by that point it won’t be a problem.

**ldavinci:** Hm.  
  


She doesn’t say anything else. Merlin eyeballs that single syllable with a deep sort of suspicion. The last thing he wants to do is ask what’s wrong, like he _cares_ or like a _friend_ , but the computer will start bothering him again in a while if that’s how he leaves it.

Her plans are _fiendish_.

Fortunately, _mercifully_ , Da Vinci solves the problem herself some several minutes later, just as Merlin has begun to resign himself to doing something about the conversation himself.  
  


**ldavinci:** How about a bet?

**sagerose:** nope! next question.

**ldavinci:** You’re no fun.  
  


Merlin knows. He’s already having non-literal visions of all the possible sucker bets Da Vinci could have had planned, most of them likely involving a forfeit of Merlin agreeing to show up in Chaldea for a defined period of time and/or to talk to Romani. He’s just not going to play that game at all.

**sagerose:** i am the legendary wet blanket! and?

**ldavinci:** Funny, I remember the stories the other way.   
**ldavinci:** Ah, well. I’ll stop nagging you for the immediate future, but I make no guarantees about anything six or more hours from now.  
 **ldavinci:** I’m not going to stop suggesting the two of you talk at least once, but I suppose I can accept a gracious defeat for now!   
**ldavinci:** I’ll be in touch. You know, like friends.

**sagerose:** you know i don’t have friends.

**ldavinci:** Of course you do, Merlin. Good night!

**sagerose:** you’re making that up. i’ve told you, i don’t feel things like that.  
  


She doesn’t answer him. In fact, she seems to be pointedly ignoring him. Merlin had been set to start an argument about emotions, the feeling of them, and how much he doesn’t have friends, but Da Vinci’s taken the wind out of his sails just like that.  
  


**sagerose:** now you’re being petty.  
  


Da Vinci doesn’t answer that, either. Rattled and annoyed, full of an argument with no place to go, Merlin shoves away from the flower and paces the length of his room and back again. This, too, comes out unsatisfying. The room’s not _punishingly_ small, but it is definitely lacking in variety for pacing and sulking. This corner he’s been in a thousand times, or that one? What a dizzying array of choices he has.

Never has getting the last word been _this_ irritating.

At least, Merlin thinks, he now has several uninterrupted hours to go and try his hand at fishing the icy rose out of his subconscious.

He needs better hobbies.


	3. eventually all walls will fall

Merlin strides through the village and up to the stone in what’s probably record time for him, taps his foot through the replayed memory cycle of Artoria and Caliburn and choices, choices, always the choice she made and he didn’t even _try_ to turn aside. This time the version of him caught in this moment doesn’t stir, doesn’t turn into something smug and horny, and Merlin doesn’t particularly care even though he probably _should_ be concerned about that development.

The sheep is exactly where he left it, loafed up maybe halfway down the other side of the hill. It turns its head to look up at him as he comes up beside it, then stretches, gets to its feet and baas softly.

It feels like a commentary on the situation, even if it’s just a sound to Merlin’s ears. He shrugs down at the sheep. “If you were a terrible incubus, where would _you_ hide something?” he asks it, not expecting an answer.

The sheep flicks its ears and does not offer helpful comment.

“That’s what I thought,” Merlin says grimly, and starts walking. The sheep falls in with him.

He lets the landscape of his mind and memories shift around him as he goes, not exerting conscious control on it yet. Here’s the trouble: if he wants to look at where it is, he has to figure out _what_ it is, and it’s not in his hands any more.

Roses can symbolize a lot of things. It doesn’t have to be the tritest and easiest of the lot.

“I’m a mage, not a literary analysis professor,” Merlin complains, directing this downward. The sheep’s as good a complaints department as any, and just as likely as complaining into the air to produce a response. “Is this punishment? Is it just really, really terrible irony? How am I supposed to _tell_?”

The sheep bows its head, tears up a mouthful of something that’s part grass and apparently part seaweed. The pause has taken all of a few seconds; it keeps walking with Merlin as it chews, slowly making kelpy grass disappear into its munching grinder of a mouth.

Helpful, as he expected. Merlin draws a deep breath — there’s sweet incense on the air which he steadfastly ignores — and tries again. Roses before frankincense.

The rose the other him took away and hid was pretty much the twin to the one he gave to Mash to give to Romani, the one that Merlin used for tether to pull Romani back to life and living of it. One rose looks much like another… Merlin sighs, and squashes the justification he really wants to make. No. He knows flowers, and he knows the infinite variety of wild and cultivated roses. It was the same one, give or take some ice. So: he can conclude that the thing is about Romani, one way or another.

And therein lies the trouble. Rose symbolism _is_ easy.

But he’s already admitted to the thing it probably does symbolize. Tangentially. Without as many words. To the mirror of himself. …With a declaration that he intended to let it die on the vine, as it were. It was still admitting it, Merlin argues. Grass has gone interestingly orange under his boots, reverting from kelp to something softer. He checks the horizon for ominous woods — nothing — and then keeps thinking through his disagreement with himself.

All right, ice is a decent way to kill most flowers. Especially the most delicate of roses. Merlin does like the wild ones best, so despite its classic looks he doesn’t expect this one was _too_ delicate, but it’s still telling.

 _When’s the mage of flowers ever been any good at letting things wither?_ echoes somewhere in the back of his head, shadow of the conversation with the other him. Merlin wrinkles his nose at this and sits down where he is. Endless plains and a crimson sun above, golden sky with clouds limned red. “It’s not that I want to keep it alive,” he says, discussing the issue with the open air and the grazing sheep. “It’s just that it’s _mine_ , so I don’t want it hidden from me.” Yeah, that sounds better. Merlin nods to himself. That’s totally it.

The sheep doesn’t seem impressed, but he’s learned enough about the sheep by now to know that it’s basically never impressed.

“Even if it was lllll,” Merlin starts arguing, and finds he can’t say the word he deeply suspects of being at fault here. Honestly, if he was human he’d be telling himself to go see a professional. Good thing for everyone he’s not, and therefore isn’t having that problem! He tries again, putting the problem out into the open air a little more objectively. “For the sake of argument,” he tells the sheep, conspiratorial. “Just because. Say I had, somehow, developed some kind of feelings of the squishy and human variety, for _that man_.”

He has the urge to look over his shoulder to see if anyone’s heard him. The sheep, munching on orange grass still, doesn’t show any sign that it’s listening to Merlin, which is honestly the best thing it _could_ do. If it _had_ paid any attention to him, Merlin might just have stopped having this conversation with himself at all.

“…Say I was,” Merlin continues, finding no one behind him, no one at all as far as the horizon stretches. “How stupid would that be, right? I haven’t actually spent that much time talking to him.” A pause. He wrinkles his nose, makes amends. “Okay,” he says, “I did a lot of online chatting, and I’m forced to admit those are real friendships in general. In general. Not specifically as applies to me. I am a fifteen-hundred-year-old man-shaped cambion pretending to be a cute young human woman. They make true crime shows about that kind of thing.”

 _Crunchmunchmunchmunchmunch_.

Yeah. Super helpful, sheep! Keep it up! Merlin crosses his legs in front of him, props his elbows on his knees and his chin in his paired hands. The crimson sun slowly weaves back and forth in the sky, tracing a setting path more like a sine wave than the Earth-typical arc. The sheep’s shadow stretches this way and that; Merlin watches it idly, with lidded eyes, half-expecting it to become something else.

It stays sheep-shaped. While he’s watching it, at least, which isn’t necessarily a guarantee.

“…anyway,” he says at length, to the sheep and its shadow. “I will accept, again for the sake of argument, that I’ve gotten to know _that man_ , and have a reasonable grasp of ninety percent of his secrets, as well as what he looks like at highs and lows. Most humans would say that’s enough to know whether or not you llll— like to spend time around someone.” Merlin chews on the inside of his cheek, not hard enough to draw blood, and considers the issue some more. “The problem then is that he doesn’t know me at all. Well, it’s only a problem if I say I want something from him. Which I…”

He doesn’t. He doesn’t want anything from Romani, just that he live and not waste Merlin’s work. Right?

The terrible part is that he can practically hear what Da Vinci would say. Well, not hear, maybe, but see it in her jaunty near-perfect typing, exclamation points and all. _That sounds like something Romani would have an opinion on!_ or _You know, you’re not going to solve that all in your head. The last I checked, being clairvoyant didn’t make you telepathic. Am I wrong?_

The idea of her isn’t wrong. Merlin lifts his head so he can rub one hand across his eyes, and subsequently bat the illusion of text written in smoke out of the air before him. No, dream Da Vinci’s words. He’s not having it.

“That’s really only a problem if I’m doing something about it,” he says. “Which I’m not. Possibilities or not, feelings or not, it’s all a stupid idea. Even if it _was_ something that could be…”

There’s nothing to reciprocate. Merlin sighs, and flops down into the orange grasses, sprawling out on his back and staring up at the darkening sky. Stupid. This is stupid. What was he doing again? Right. Finding the rose. He’s tiptoed around enough of what it is, anyway.

He can hear the sheep move closer to him, footsteps vibrating gently through the earth beneath his back. It resumes its munching approximately right next to Merlin’s ear, which he tolerates for a grand total of three seconds before angling his head to the other side, and tugging his hair _well_ out of the possible line of fire.

“Okay,” he says to the unfeeling sky. “I’ve got it. The flower is … potential feelings. It’s ice because I’m trying to kill them and it would be dumb to hold on to them for long, but the thing about ice is it pretty much preserves what it freezes, and if I wasn’t a self-harming masochist I’d have gone with fire or acid or poisoned soil, something a lot more practical than ice. So if I was me, I’d put it…”

Making the connection is hard, harder than it should be. Merlin can feel his focus trying to go anywhere else, like pressing magnets against each other. It would be so much easier to do or think literally anything else, but Merlin’s about had it with his own mind hiding things from him. He’s going to set the damned thing on fire himself, and that’s the thought that pushes him forward.

Something that grieves him, which he can neither let go of nor accept as it is, and so sticks in him exactly in the way he left it, neither dying nor living, only eternally caught in the amber of nostalgia and pain. It’s a good thing Da Vinci _isn’t_ here, honestly; she’d have made the connection hours ago and then Merlin would never hear the end of it.

“That smug asshole,” Merlin says, of the other him, and rolls over to push himself to his feet. “He needs to stop being so good at being me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * Chapter title refs -- "Paint your faith on your wall/ Eventually your walls will fall/ Cause things we build don't last as long" - _Growing Things_ , the Shook Twins
> 



	4. the great clone sex debate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * Disclaimer: no actual clone sex.
>   * warning: dream injury
>   * warning: mild body horror, ymmv
> 


It will never be the last time Merlin walks up the hill to the stone, to the Sword of Selection, to Artoria all youthful hope and determination frozen in the moment of _this is my choice, Merlin_. He doesn’t know how to put this away, never has. Probably never will.

This time, at least, things look a little different; now that Merlin knows what he’s looking for, and knows that he expects to find it here, Caliburn isn’t all Caliburn. From this angle a sword, but if he walks around it, ignoring the shapes of the people of the memory, the sword splits apart and comes back together, an illusion resolving one shape into the other. Here is the rose, the crimson of blood rich under the veil of ice. Merlin crouches to look at it, robe pooling behind him, and doesn’t touch.

He could just leave it here. It’d be safe here.

Someone hunkers down next to him, a flash of white in the corner of his vision, and without thinking Merlin snatches the rose up, tucks it into his sleeve where it starts to ache at his wrist in the particular burning way cold has. The other him isn’t pulling _that_ trick again—

“Merlin, what are you hiding?”

—it’s Artoria, fifteen and indefatigably curious, the panels of her long tunic scrunched up in a mess that’s half skirt and half robes as she crouches next to Merlin.

Merlin’s heart attempts to leave by way of his stomach. “It’s nothing,” he says automatically. _Oh_ , that’s cold.

“You can’t be hiding nothing from me,” she says, and for his troubles gives him a mildly reproachful look, the one that says _Merlin, I was not born yesterday, I know you oversaw my birth but remember I will be your King—_ “If it was nothing, you wouldn’t be hiding it.”

Aaaah, Merlin’s projecting. “Nothing for young eyes,” he amends, putting an eye-crinkling smile on out of sheer defensive habit. “Come on, now, don’t you have something to be hitting with a sword?”

His subconscious, this realm of his dreams and memories, has never done this to him before. Merlin doesn’t dream uncontrollably. He _doesn’t_. Heartache has never looked him in the eyes and teased him gently.

Artoria shifts, older but no taller, white exchanged for blue and silver, wildness for a sober measurement. “Merlin,” she says. “Give it to me.”

Merlin is halfway through automatically obeying when his rational thoughts catch up to him. He stills with the rose in his hand, with Artoria reaching for it, and really _thinks_ about it.

The only thing that inhabits his dreams is himself.

He closes his fist around the rose, heedless of the blood the thorns draw, and stands up, turns around all in a rush. “Stop looking like her,” he says, as firmly as he can.

There’s a sound from behind, perhaps rustling cloth, perhaps a person changing the shape of himself. Moments later arms snake around his waist — Merlin twitches — and a sharp chin drops on his shoulder. His own eyes, slit-pupiled and wrong, look sidelong at him when he manages the glance. “Come _oooon_ ,” the other Merlin says. “You don’t even want it!”

“ _You_ want it,” Merlin returns primly. Oh, that hurts. At least the cold of the rose is slowing the flow of blood between his fingers. “So either I actually do want it, because you’re me and I’m you, or I’m keeping it out of spite.” He’s never been so annoyed to be hugged in his _life_. “Or both.”

The other one unfolds one arm to bat hopefully at Merlin’s wrist, reaching for the rose; Merlin holds it pointedly out of reach. The other Merlin subsides into squeezing him vengefully around the middle instead. “I’m just _saying_ ,” he says. “We could actually get rid of it, instead of putting it up on a pedestal for self-flagellation.”

Briefly there is something like a lash in Merlin’s hand, petals at the handle and thorns down three dangling straps. It’s a rose again in an instant, but the symbolism is not lost on him. “It’s _mine_ ,” Merlin says, aware he sounds childish and not about to do anything to solve that problem. “If I want to get rid of it, I’ll set it on fire myself. Is this reverse psychology? Is that what you’re doing?”

“I don’t know,” the other says. “You tell me.”

The impasse does not resolve itself. Merlin can’t actually feel his hand, but like hell is he going to open it. He knows he was planning on fire and poison and salt just earlier that night, but…

But what?

The other Merlin _is_ him. It’s not a fractured-psyche type of thing, or at least it never has been before; this is just Merlin reflected, the things that don’t always make it out to the external persona. The appearance of a separate body fools even his own thoughts sometimes, but it’s only ever been him. So Merlin reminds himself: he is both the one trying to get rid of the rose, and the one trying to keep it. Why does he want to get rid of it? So it won’t hurt him any more. Why does he want to keep it?

…well, probably so it’ll keep hurting him.

Utterly fed up with himself and the entire circular clusterfuck, Merlin draws his hand in and slams the rose thorns-first into his chest.

“Oh,” the Merlin behind him says, sounding dismayed. “Oh, what did you do _that_ for?”

It seemed like a good idea ten seconds ago. Merlin looks down, finds his robe steadily staining red, a parody of a blooming rose petalling out from his heart. “It’s _mine_ ,” he says. His voice comes out more tremulous than he thinks it should, and he’s just finished thinking _that_ when his legs give out.

He is willing to allow that he may have made a mistake.

The other Merlin catches him, or tries to; the arms around Merlin shift to catch his shoulders, hold tight, and then the two of them are on the grassy earth in a tangle of limbs and well-meant pain. “How are we this _stupid_?” the other wants to know, voice rich with an unhappy irony.

“Habit,” Merlin says, distantly, automatically. At least he doesn’t have to hold himself up, even if the legs he’s sprawled across aren’t the most comfortable things in the world. He brings a hand up to cover his heart, morbidly fascinated by the sense of bleeding, and finds the soft silk of flower petals instead of the liquid heat of blood.

He still feels like he’s bleeding, though. And his chest _aches_ , aches like he’s been hit with something heavy and is going to be feeling the impact through his bones for days after this.

“Great.” The other Merlin reaches across him, hand light over Merlin’s, and tugs very lightly at the flower. Merlin feels it as if that tug goes through him, as if the other is trying to pull his heart out even with such a little gesture, and he gasps pained and soundless, scrabbles at his other’s wrist. No no no that’s _his—_

The other him stops, twines their fingers instead. Merlin doesn’t know how to cope with _that_ strange intimacy — he’s holding hands with himself because he’s so starved for positive attention that he’s reduced to masturbation, maybe? — so he just holds, tries not to whimper. The feeling of something in his chest hasn’t gone away.

“It’s rooting,” the other Merlin says. “It’s going to be even worse to get rid of, now.”

Maybe Merlin doesn’t _want_ to get rid of it. —Oh, but that _hurts_ , the squeeze of his heart, the phantom of thorns and questing roots. His grip on his other self’s hand tightens, mostly because he doesn’t have anything _else_ to hang on to. “Hurts,” he manages aloud, indignant about it.

“No kidding.” The other one manhandles Merlin awkwardly into his lap, instead of just sprawled out across his legs. Merlin tries to help and doesn’t really get anywhere, just makes pained noises every time he’s jarred more than a little. “We’re _pathetic_. Okay, okay. Shhhh.” The hand Merlin isn’t holding strokes his hair away from his brow. “I think we’ve just got to feel it, now.”

“‘s’this _we_ ,” Merlin manages, complaining. _He’s_ the only one with something lodged in his chest, thank you very much.

“I’m you, remember.” The other Merlin bends over him, and his expression is surprisingly gentle. “Just a little less restrained. And a _little_ less stupid, because I actually acknowledge the mistakes we’ve made, even when you successfully repress.” He pats Merlin’s shoulder. “You don’t hate yourself so much that I’m without compassion. I _am_ , however, going to point and laugh when we’re through this, because we have never seen a bad idea we didn’t immediately try to fuck, have we?”

Merlin wants to argue with that and very much can’t. The driving ache in his chest is consuming, like he’ll never feel anything else again. Every time he tries to think there’s just thundering, a weight too big to be contained by his ribs and a pounding that won’t stop. He gasps for breath instead, closes his eyes and turns his face to hide it against the other him’s leg.

“Shhh,” the other Merlin says again, and strokes his hair. “Let it be.”

Merlin gives up, and lets the damned thing put its roots in his heart. He feels:

want

yearning

a ragged knife clutched in a naked fist

bruises of a lover’s hands smudged across his hips

heat deep in his gut, at once burning harsh and warming kindly

nostalgia for a home that was never his

something desperate and clinging and inescapably lonely, reaching for anything to see the truths at Merlin’s core and say, despite cowardice and clairvoyance: _you are not alone_.

His heart does not stop aching, and every time he breathes he feels thorns. He can’t stop thinking of Romani, of the long correspondences floating in the not-quite-real place between dreams and internet, of this truth: he had wept when the man who was once King Solomon took himself out of the world.

Eventually Merlin remembers he has a body that isn’t just briars, and opens his eyes. They’re wet— no surprise there, he guesses. When he tries to lift a hand to wipe his face, he finds one still caught by the other him. Merlin rubs his other sleeve across his eyes, tries to sit up, and fails laughably.

“Today is the worst,” he says to the deep night sky and the shadow of himself. He feels thorns prick with every breath, each one an ill-advised instant message or a wistful stolen glance across the world.

“Suck it up,” the other him says lazily, and squeezes his hand without letting go. “How’re we doing, there?”

Merlin thinks about it. Really thinks about it. “Well,” he says at length, slow and deliberating and maybe a tiny bit intending to tweak his own impatience. “Even if I _am_ in love, it’s at least half with an idea, and he doesn’t know me barely at all.” The rose of yearning throbs in his chest. “It’s pretty pointless, when it comes down to it!”

The other Merlin pulls his hair, sharp and petty. “We’re unbelievable,” he says, disgusted.

Putting on a good show of cheerfulness, only a _little_ brittle around the edges, Merlin squirms in his lap, pitches his voice low and lascivious specifically to be obnoxious. “You’re not discouraging me, you know.”

His gift for _that_ is a hand in his face; but both of them are laughing, as every version of Merlin is well aware he has never lost any sort of dare involving sex, and he’s not in a mood to debate the clone sex issue. Merlin slumps over himself, and— it’s nice, it honestly is. Pathetic, sure, that he can only get a good old-fashioned cuddle from his own subconscious. But still nice.

There’s a flower in his chest. Merlin tries not to think about it too hard, wonders vaguely what it’s going to feel like when he wakes himself back up to the physical world. Things don’t operate on a strictly one to one ratio, between conscious and subconscious, but then again he’s never done the stupid thing he just did before, either.

Many actions have consequences, and that which happens in dreams isn’t necessarily untrue or unreal just for being a dream.

“Seriously,” Merlin says eventually. “What _is_ the sheep?”

“Dunno,” the other Merlin says. He bats at Merlin — there is some brief and careful wrestling — they wind up sprawled out next to each other. Merlin has an arm over his chest, just shy of the aching flower, and it’s not the worst feeling in the world, that pressure. “It’s part of us, it pretty much has to be, but what it means? Search me.”

Merlin ponders the merits of a strip search for a few seconds before discarding it. He doesn’t really want to get up or start something right now, and certainly not both. “It showed up in David’s dream, remember,” he says instead of joking.

“I remember.” The other Merlin fumbles vaguely, pats Merlin’s face at an off angle such that half of it is on Merlin’s nose. “Either we decided we liked the imagery and reproduced it, or we have such terrible control over whatever it represents that it bled out of us in David’s head.”

Honestly, Merlin doesn’t like either of those options, and he knows the other him doesn’t either. “I really don’t care about sheep one way or another,” he says, damning them both with it. “But come on, sheep symbolism? It’s not like it can be innocence at _this_ stage of things.”

“True.” There’s a long silence as Merlin considers this issue with himself. “I wouldn’t consider us easily led, either.”

“Ornery and horny, maybe,” Merlin says, elbowing sort-of in the other Merlin’s direction.

“That’d be a goat,” the other Merlin says, and promptly elbows him back. Merlin attempts to defend his ribs, but too late, with the ache in his chest making everything else slower and stiffer. He settles for an elbow in return, once more, and they tussle briefly again, Merlin wincing all the while but unwilling to give ground.

The other Merlin comes out on top, heaves himself across to lay bodily over Merlin’s chest. It— almost hurts. Sort of hurts. It _should_ hurt, this pressure on a tender aching thing, and he’s prepared for that, but in the end it’s the _absence_ of pain that surprises him.

Merlin gives up trying to predict it and just stares up, at the endless sky and the stars sketched across it, the constellations shifting their points around and trying on new shapes, new stories with every breath. He’s starting to feel vaguely like he should have heard from Da Vinci by now, but maybe it was hidden in something else. Maybe Merlin hasn’t known what six hours feels like in at least a thousand years.

“Are we agreed that it’s a stupid idea to do anything about this?” Merlin asks eventually. He tries to pat his chest, finds himself on top of him, and settles for an aimless wave instead.

“I mean, we thought feeling it in the first place was stupid,” the other Merlin says. He still has horns, Merlin notes, the tips of which drag little tracks in the grassy earth beside them as he moves his head. “Remember that, literally earlier this evening?”

Merlin feels around, attempts to flick himself in the nose. He’s pretty sure he misses, but the other Merlin still makes a noise of complaint, so Merlin calls it a win. “I mean it. You’re not going to hijack us into an embarrassing public confession, or something else out of a bad twentieth-century rom-com, are you?”

“Not unless you really want me to,” the other Merlin says, and, “Give me that.” He snags Merlin’s hand again, ostensibly to prevent further nose flicks. Merlin opts not to mention that if he likes it, the other him also likes it, almost certainly.

“I don’t think I want me to,” Merlin says. He doesn’t bother to fight Merlin on the hand thing. “…I’ll feel it if I have to, I guess, but that can’t make me _do_ anything about it.” It’s not the optimally painless solution. It’s going to nag and weigh and ache at him, this terrible clawing yearning that surges up whenever Merlin starts to think too much about Chaldea.

He guesses he deserves it. It’ll be fine in a couple centuries, more than likely.

“We’re super well-adjusted,” the Merlin on top of him says, and yawns, and puts his head back down. “Wake me up when something new is happening.”

Merlin gives serious thought to punting himself back out to consciousness, but… pathetic as he is, he’s going to take the contact while he has it. Da Vinci will wake him up one way or another if she actually needs him.

For the mean time, Merlin closes his eyes and drifts in peaceful contemplation. It occurs to him, in passing, to wonder where the sheep’s gotten to; but it’s not causing trouble, or he’d definitely know about it, so he can’t be bothered to get up.

The rest of the issues can wait.


	5. the sound of growing things

Time passes, as it does. Merlin has no idea how much, as is often usual, but eventually the thought appears again that it probably _has_ been a while since Da Vinci said anything. This time he does wake himself up to go and check.

He tells himself that he doesn’t have to tell _her_ he got up specifically to see if she was messaging him. It’s not like they’re friends, and he’s definitely not worried, he just doesn’t like waiting in dread for his dreams to be interrupted by her insistence.

Yeah. Nailed it.

There’s no messages from her, though, and per the timestamps it’s been more like twenty-four hours than the six she threatened. Now Merlin will admit he might be a little worried, but mostly because if Da Vinci isn’t following through on her threats to inconvenience him, then it means she probably has urgent things to take care of. Not all that much would rate higher on her list than bothering Merlin. He thinks. Maybe that’s his ego. Actually, he hopes that’s his ego. Let Da Vinci just have gotten distracted by a fun new device.

Merlin puts the flower down and strolls over to the narrow window, a whole four paces’ worth of stretching his legs before he leans against the sill. He knows he can’t fit out and would be prevented besides, but he can at least _look_ for the change of pace. Flowers upon flowers stretch out below, all lush colors and growth.

Maybe Da Vinci’s just plotting against him. Promise six hours and then leave him alone completely — Merlin might start conversation just to sate his curiosity. Or look at Chaldea and…

Yeah, he’s not doing that. His chest hurts, dull and throbbing, as he thinks about it. Merlin tilts his head to the side to lean it against the cool stone, lets his gaze go distant and fuzzy. It’s hard, not to focus on anything, to let the flowers below merge into blurry blobs of brightness. Before very long Merlin winds up looking at the more distant flowers anyway, surveying the far-off place where a stream branches and a few delicate belled flowers in electric blue mark the fork.

Absently he touches his chest. There’s no dampness, no silken petals. Nothing like proof of what had passed in his dreams. But under his ribs there’s still the sense of thorns, of a rose grown wild and clutching.

For once he’s in perfect agreement with himself: he’s an absolute idiot. Wanting in every sense of the word.

Idly, like feeling around the edges of a wound, Merlin presses his attention toward the distant flower of his magic.

Not to look. He’s not _looking_. But it’s his magic, his created item, something between dreams and Merlin and flowers and Avalon, and it’s not hard to be just… _aware_ of it. It feels much like the one in his chest, all prickles and aches. That, he’s sure, isn’t an accident. He practices that careful awareness, accepting its existence without looking at what’s around it — there may be occasional cheating flashes of white hair, but it’s not like Merlin gets anything useful out of them, just continues to be vaguely aware that Romani exists and isn’t actively bleeding. That’s fine.

One of the flashes has a copper-red streak in it. Merlin tries not to get more curious.

He’s in the middle of that particular attempt, the squashing of curiosity, when he feels the rose in Chaldea start to actively pull at him. Merlin sits upright, leaning away from the wall with some mild alarm. What’s it doing _that_ for?

He could look…

The rose is trying to gather blood. There’s fresh blood spilt. And close on the heels of _that_ genuinely alarming sensation, there’s something that pulls at him more: not at the thing that’s snared his chest, but at the place where Merlin touches Avalon most intimately, the seat in his being where his “Noble Phantasm” sits. Whatever that pull is needs power. If it’s the rose—

Romani needs—

Merlin opens the tenuous link like a floodgate, murmuring. Here at the edge of eternity he stands, and he may see to the four corners of paradise, and the blessings of Avalon will be appropriately bestowed if he has to cram every last one of them into Chaldea himself.

Magic flows. The Garden of Avalon embraces that which calls it, rich with life and heat and power that races through Merlin and away, leaving little but warmth in his skin to mark its passing.

Secure in the knowledge that’s taken care of, and no one in the Garden’s extendedbounds will be dying any time soon, Merlin finally dares to _look_ at what’s going on in Chaldea, judging now that since apparently there is a _bleeding_ sort of emergency going on, he’s justified. This isn’t yearning and selfishness, this is a well-founded urge to see that no one undoes all his hard work on putting Romani back together.

Merlin looks, and he _sees_ —

—blood and exercise equipment and gold—

—and a really frankly excessive amount of chains, and that’s _it_ , as if some wall around the space has been closed to him. A hard cutoff, like running into an unexpectedly locked door or having someone slam a book in his face, which is frankly _rude_ , and not doing anything for the quickened, concerned beat of his heart. He looks at it from a different angle, tries stretching vision to see perhaps the near past, but there’s very little he can actually get eyes on. Merlin sees gold chains and a person of clay and more kings than Merlin is strictly comfortable with being in the same room, all scattered images and impressions rather than the clear sight he’s accustomed to getting out of his clairvoyance.

It’s enough _impressions,_ at least, that Merlin can come to a conclusion. That conclusion is Gilgamesh. Merlin doesn’t really like this conclusion, especially given that the King of Heroes is doing a credible job at _blocking Merlin’s sight_. He rakes his awareness across Chaldea for someone sleeping he might be able to borrow. There’s no one unconscious whose dreams he can really use to get a leg in the door — Merlin begins to run through the pros and cons of slipping through deeply inhospitable dreams, or just manifesting himself in Chaldea and all pretensions be damned.

…no. That’s a bad idea, he reminds himself, no matter how the humming thorns clutching at his heart seem to squeeze hopefully for it. He provided immediate help. The rose is no longer tasting fresh blood, only dried, which it will take but not urgently or gladly. It’s fine. It’s probably fine. Fights happen faster than movies think. It was probably just…

An accident in the exercise room.

A brief argument.

…a brief argument that came to bladed blows and Gilgamesh, insightful and foresightful, _preventing Merlin from seeing_. Perhaps not.

A deep suspicion overcomes Merlin then, about the level of planning Gilgamesh has put into place.

He checks on the rose. It’s holding on to Romani. Romani is alive, and not in immediate danger of bleeding out. That’s enough. That _has_ to be enough, Merlin can’t charge in there like an idiot, and he’s not a hero to run to anyone’s rescue. He did what he could, and Romani’s… alive, if possibly traumatized.

Da Vinci will catch him up, Merlin tells himself.

He still chafes at the want to _do something_. But if he can’t — won’t — can’t go over there, then what?

For once Merlin doesn’t pitch himself into the mass of other dreams and unconscious humans as a way of escaping the uncomfortable, but it’s a near thing. He winds up braiding flower-vines instead, plaiting the loose tendrils together where they curl in through the window. Mostly they put up with this, but when he takes his hands away they unbraid themselves.

That’s best for them. Merlin just needs something to keep him busy, and the tower is terribly short on hobby materials. Maybe he’ll take up organic book-binding — he’s not lacking for pigments to write with, at the very least. He could grow himself a press.

Worry thrums underneath every fickle frivolous consideration. Merlin squashes it down, more or less, but it still grips his heart; and when his computer finally _does_ chime Merlin nearly trips over himself on the lunge to get to the screen.

Oh well. Da Vinci never has to know that, either.  
  


**ldavinci:** Surprise!   
**ldavinci:** Before anything else: don’t panic, everything is fine.

**sagerose:** i already know something happened and Gilgamesh was involved.

**ldavinci:** Oh? Have you been peeking?  
  


Technically, Merlin has been; but she means voyeurism, whereas he would mean accidental flashes of something he can’t have and is trying to accustom himself to. He opts to say nothing on _that_ topic.  
  


**sagerose:** no, i just tend to notice when someone uses me as a conduit to Avalon.   
**sagerose:** i passed everything i could along. i assume by your chipper demeanor that was helpful enough.

**ldavinci:** Everyone is fine.  
 **ldavinci:** Well, Mash has a sprained ankle and we’ve had several cases of mild-to-moderate hypothermia because someone decided to test out Enuma Elish in an unapproved location.  
  


Oh. That’s great. Merlin’s going to have to commit regicide. At least it’s not treason, technically.

…gently he reins his impulses back. Gilgamesh does as Gilgamesh wills, and _usually_ he has a good reason for it, even if that reason is wildly arrogant god-logic to ordinary mortals; and anyway, as Da Vinci has pointed out, everyone is fine. Which means, Enuma Elish or not, Merlin has no business holding Gilgamesh accountable for what _might_ have happened.  
  


**sagerose:** and by someone, you mean Gilgamesh.

**ldavinci:** And by someone I mean Gilgamesh, yes.   
**ldavinci:** He and Romani had a discussion that grew heated, apparently.   
**ldavinci:** Romani was injured, but isn’t any longer, so you don’t need to worry.  
  


Merlin gives serious thought to pretending he wasn’t worried at all, but… honestly, that feels like too big a lie even for him, right now. He presses his palm over his heart and waits for Da Vinci to type something else.  
  


**ldavinci:** Anyway, that’s why I haven’t been bothering you.  
 **ldavinci:** Your break is now over! I hope you’ve been well?  
  


That’s a friendly overture. Merlin eyeballs the screen suspiciously. She’s acting like they’re friends again, and arguing feels like a lot of work. Rebuffing her feels like a lot of work, too. It’d be wiser in the long run to deter it all, especially given Merlin is still planning to steadfastly refuse anything like “talk to Romani” or “come visit Chaldea.”

He presses a little harder over his chest, digging the heel of his palm in as if it can alleviate all the nonsense that’s going on under his sternum. He doesn’t really _want_ to shove Da Vinci off. It’s a raw thought, something nervous and naked and looking desperately around for clothes, but it’s a true one.

Ugh.  
  


**sagerose:** fine, fine. had a long chat with myself about ethics.  
  


This is sort-of accurate, he argues to himself, but will reveal pretty much nothing.  
  


**ldavinci:** Somehow, not what I expected.

**sagerose:** here to keep you on your toes!   
**sagerose:** not that i don’t appreciate the update, but i was expecting you to be trying to harangue me into coming to visit by now.

**ldavinci:** Well, I have to change tactics that don’t work, don’t I?   
**ldavinci:** In any case, it actually isn’t the best time for visitors, now.  
  


Merlin considers whether she might have taken up reverse psychology before he remembers that a hole in Chaldea is a thing they’d have to divert a lot of resources to deal with, and also that trauma and recovery are probably happening.  
  


**sagerose:** alas, i must disappoint you. i shall not be showing up to inconvenience you out of pure contrariness.

**ldavinci:** I think I shall manage to live with that!  
 **ldavinci:** Although I still do think it would be a good idea for you and Romani to talk.  
 **ldavinci:** But that’s just advice from a friend.

**sagerose:** …  
  


He types the ellipsis purely so he can think about the answer, so he won’t have to worry about her script activating and dinging him again and again. She keeps asserting that, and now that he has the opportunity squarely in front of him, not just tangential, Merlin can’t bring himself to contradict her.

What all did the rose _do_ to him? What did he do to himself, all unwitting? Merlin rubs at his chest again, this time with fingertips scraping, and frowns.  
  


**sagerose:** anyway. was that everything?

**ldavinci:** For now! I think that status update is enough to be getting on with, don’t you?  
  


Merlin definitely makes a face at the screen, something sneering and cranky that he knows Da Vinci doesn’t deserve.  
  


**sagerose:** more than enough. go take care of everyone, Da Vinci.   
**sagerose:** Chaldea needs you.

**ldavinci:** Even with Romani back, huh?

**sagerose:** please. you don’t need me to stroke your ego, do you? if Ritsuka and Mash are the beating heart, you’re definitely the brain. or something in the frontal lobe, anyway.

**ldavinci:** I’ll play along. What does that make Romani?  
  


Will she give it a rest, Merlin wants to know, and picks the first organ off the top of his head.  
  


**sagerose:** the lungs, of course! now shoo. you know where to find me.

**ldavinci:** I’ll be sure to let him know he takes your breath away~

  
She signs off with that. Merlin would be more worried if he didn’t think she was joking; and sure enough a quick peek over at where Da Vinci sits, unaccompanied, reveals she’s laughing softly to herself as she logs out, eyes soft at the corners with something in the vicinity of merriment.  
  


**sagerose:** Leonardo da Vinci, you’re a menace.  
  


He leaves that — disgustingly fond — insult for her to find later, assured now that his computer won’t be battering down the walls of his dreams demanding an effort in the near future. Merlin _does_ have a second order of business, but this one he conducts sitting down against the wall, rather than with a computer in his lap. The vine twining in through the narrow window offers him crimson trumpet-flowers, rich and sensuous and laden with gold pollen and amber scents.

Appropriate. Merlin strokes the petals absently, fingers coming away with a smattering of hopeful golden dust, and settles back.

It’s okay to look at Chaldea if he’s not looking for Romani, or at least it is by his own admittedly warped standards. Merlin steers his gaze carefully clear of anything that might be dangerously full of king-doctor, instead looking for the gaudiest golden armor he can find.

He doesn’t find it. His gaze flicks through Chaldea’s complement of kings, and on the whole golden armor is in short supply. Odd, since Da Vinci specified Enuma Elish, and that particular Noble Phantasm is only seen in the hands of Gilgamesh-the-hero, not Gilgamesh who is king of Uruk and all its people.

(Merlin makes allowance for Enkidu. Theirs is not the same; the entwined name is the entwined path. Also, Enkidu has never worn the Berserker’s Madness Enhancement while in Chaldea. The culprit is _doubtless_ Gilgamesh.)

Far-seeing, Merlin skips past Alexander and — nope he didn’t see that king in blue absolutely not — and Nero and Caesar and Cleopatra — gold and gold and gold, but not the right one. Kings are thick on the ground in Chaldea, so why can’t he find the one he’s _actually_ looking for?

It occurs to Merlin very, sadly belatedly that he should just look for Enkidu instead.

Enkidu is much easier to find, being that they are not actively trying to hide; and while they are rarely bedecked in gold, there is something about the new-leaf color of their hair in this form that Merlin can usually spot. Also, as they are technically Noble Phantasm and Servant at once, their presence is metaphysically easier to pick out.

They’re in one of the rooms originally for staff, since taken over by Servants — who, while they don’t strictly need to sleep, do like to have their own space, and doubly so when they’re kings — and with them is Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh with the diadem in his hair, shoulders marked in violet instead of crimson, gold at his throat instead of across his back; Gilgamesh who ought to have been the one to take up the mantle of Grand Caster instead of Merlin.

The quiet casual attitude of Gilgamesh’s lounging is ruined when he looks up sharply, looks _at Merlin_. Ah. Hm. Yes. It would not be the first time a clairvoyant has looked back across to where Merlin sits in his tower, but it never gets less unsettling, when Merlin is used to being unapproachable and invisible. “You’re later than I anticipated,” Gilgamesh says, and promptly closes his eyes and puts his head down.

It’s an invitation, if not in as many words. Merlin watches Enkidu dutifully chain the door before returning to sit near Gilgamesh. Dreams are Merlin’s domain; Gilgamesh’s mind is his. The ground between them is as balanced as it can be.

All the same, when Merlin feels Gilgamesh’s dreams open up before him, when he steps across to visit that meeting of minds, he makes sure his staff is in his hand, and the draw of the sword netted there is clear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * you can cover so much ground with "Gilgamesh, what the fuck."
> 



	6. let it rise up from the ground

Merlin remembers this clearly: the dizzying rush of summon, the palace of Uruk, the throne of the king he would swear is upholstered in gold. Gilgamesh, regarding him with the easy assurance of a king regarding a vassal, certain that one will serve. It’s well-chosen, as dreams go, for the last time they were like this Merlin had every intention to pledge his service for the immediate future. The implication carries clearly that Gilgamesh is willing to tolerate a complaint from a servant, not a grievance between equals.

For all that his mother was a princess, Merlin’s never been king of anything, and has spent the majority of his unimprisoned life serving them. It’s deeply annoying that so much of his social circle is kings. Maybe he _will_ have to spend more time with Da Vinci.

Later. Now he reminds himself that he has ever been as irreverent as he can be respectful, that he is no more human than Gilgamesh is. For a bare moment Merlin thinks he feels an extra weight on the crown of his head; then the thought is gone. Pointedly Merlin sinks awareness into the dream and draws the raised throne down to his level.

Gilgamesh’s eyes narrow, but he doesn’t otherwise move, or show any sign that Merlin’s bothered him. He remains lounging, one ankle propped on the opposite knee. “Well?” he says, sounding pointedly bored. “Have out with it and be done, then.”

Definitely _tolerated_. “What was _that_?” Merlin demands. His staff is a heavy weight in his hand, the wood-grain a distinct tactile sense stronger than anything else. “You may have blocked me from seeing whatever you were up to, but you weren’t subtle about it.”

A pause. Merlin considers the matter of respect, and the way Gilgamesh is watching him, ruby-eyed and lion-watchful. “Your Majesty,” Merlin tacks on, ungraciously, for the form of the thing. So it is understood he remembers who they both are, despite the fact he just a moment ago put them at the same level. As Casters they are equal; as king and court mage, they are not.

Wow, he really isn’t operating at full capacity, is he.

Gilgamesh unfolds himself then, stands up. He seems to be taller than Merlin somehow, even like this, even if Merlin would have sworn the difference in their heights was negligible. “I don’t see what your problem is, Merlin,” Gilgamesh says, all lofty in the way he has. Not as if he _means_ to condescend; just that everyone else around him can’t help but be of inferior quality, and so he is by default honoring them with his presence. “Is not a king entitled to his privacy when he desires?”

Merlin bites his tongue. Not for restraining himself, but because too many incandescent words have tried to make their way out of his mouth at once, and he stumbles for it. Damnable. “Not when you’re attempting to ruin all my hard work,” he says finally, leaning into the angle of _affront_ rather than anything more emotional. “You helped me with that, after all, King Gilgamesh! Why would you want to … do whatever it is you did? Even if I don’t know _exactly_ what you were doing, I’m well aware there was a great deal of blood and structural damage, and I’d prefer my work not be tested to destruction.”

Gilgamesh appears supremely unaffected. This is normal for him, to be fair, but doesn’t speak well for Merlin having made an impact. “Fool of a mage,” he says, dismissively. “If you had done such substandard work that I could break it apart with that much effort, you and your _project_ would both deserve the consequences. As it stands, I’ve done you a favor.”

“What,” Merlin says blankly. He can’t conceive of a situation where spilling that much of Romani’s blood comes out to a _favor_. In point of fact, he almost looks forward to hearing Gilgamesh’s take on things; the justification ought to have enough divine-flavored acrobatics to mount a godly circus.

Gilgamesh rolls one hand over, as if turning the page of a book, looking decidedly exasperated about the whole thing. “He had forgotten he is a king,” Gilgamesh explains. He sounds like he’s making sense to himself, at least. “To test if you had brought back only half a man, I forced him to defend himself.”

“And if he hadn’t?” Merlin presses, because he can’t not, even though he thinks he may already know the answer.

The King of Uruk just levels Merlin with a stare that is as dark as it is meaningful. He does not have to say it; Merlin suspects he may be offended that Merlin had to _ask_. Gilgamesh would not have pulled his blade.

Such is the way of the king. If Romani was of his people, his subjects, then his life would belong to Gilgamesh, to do with as he pleased; if Romani was not, if he was in truth a king in his own right, then Gilgamesh had not the right to his life. It concerns Merlin that he can see the brutal sword-edge logic in the whole thing.

Artoria was not this sort of a king. Is not. Was not.

“Well?” Gilgamesh prods. “Are you ready to offer me words of thanks, yet?”

Merlin discovers fury curdling in his gut, like a fire kindled under leaf-mat, and recognizes that he is not. He doesn’t act — sits with the feeling, face as blank as he can make it — tries to sort out whatever _else_ might be there. The throne room of Uruk remains irritatingly solid, gold and almost-perfect, unmarred by anything going on with the people in it. Gilgamesh’s sense of place, his sense of Uruk, is just that strong.

It would be satisfying to attack him, but stupid, and the satisfaction wouldn’t last. Merlin breathes out through his nose. Belated fear is what’s under the fury; it’s an anger born of attachment, of realizing how close he might have been to losing something valuable, something he’s only just acknowledged he wanted in the first place.

“Not in the least,” Merlin says, but he’s polite about it. “He’s been alive again less than a week. You might have given him time.”

Gilgamesh clicks his tongue dismissively. “It was intolerable,” he says. “The King of Mages, brought to powerless grieving and wrapped in cotton. Be honest, Merlin: would you want him as such, a man who seeks to hide from what he is and drown himself in the rivers of loss?”

Something sours in Merlin, pinching at him where he doesn’t want to admit there’s a mark hit. If he _were_ to imagine anything with Romani, foolish though it might be, it would be the man he had grown to know over the course of the Singularities: afraid, but continuing with all his strength nevertheless.

Some trauma is to be expected after a sudden resurrection, Merlin reminds himself. A man is entitled to some peace to mourn what he never had time to before. And then something else Gilgamesh had said processes, and Merlin flushes hot then ice cold all in quick succession. “He’s his own business now,” Merlin says, and he barely even believes himself. “I just have an interest for all the work I put into him, not— anything else.”

Oh, that was bad. He is the _worst_ liar these days.

King Gilgamesh raises one imperious eyebrow. “You and your trite drama bore me,” he says, an uncompromising assessment. “Though it was not _for_ you, I have cut through the knot that would have plagued you, and later you will thank me for it; but I suppose I will accept for the moment that you are so distraught as to be short-sighted.”

Merlin chokes on a laugh. Distraught. _Short-sighted_. He’s totally fine, and King Gilgamesh of Uruk has absolutely lost it.

“If you are not going to begin a fight, then begone instead,” Gilgamesh says finally, looking Merlin up and down. “You are worse than a— what are they calling them— soap opera. Mind yourself, Merlin, and I expect that the next time I see you shall be on your knees.”

Is that a king’s imperative, or a mage’s vision? Merlin wonders about it, and opts not to ask. Not now; not yet. It’s not like he categorically objects to activities on his knees, but there’s something about the way Gilgamesh says it that gets under Merlin’s skin.

Much of Gilgamesh is getting under Merlin’s skin, of late.

“We’ll see about that,” Merlin says lightly, dizzily. “And if I find unreasonable amounts of Romani’s blood spilled by you again—”

“Unreasonable by your standards is not saying much,” Gilgamesh says, running right through Merlin’s words. “And? What then?”

That’s him burned through the last of his sensible restraint. “Then I shall do something we’ll probably both regret,” Merlin says grimly, and turns his back on the King of Uruk, and stalks off back to his own dreams. It’s not a smart choice. He knows that, and he can feel the regard that follows him, weighty and regal on his back. Later, someday later, Merlin will more than likely pay for this conversation, one way or another.

Later is not now.

Anyway, it’s not like Merlin is going to be in Chaldea at any point in the near future for Gilgamesh to harangue, attack, or otherwise inflict regret on. All that ties them is the bond of mages, of Casters and clairvoyants.

Merlin wakes in his tower, and spends a very long time staring at the wall opposite, at the pale stone and the vines that curl across it and the bright flowers that spot the dullness. He doesn’t know what his mind does, exactly; just an aimless sort of wandering that keeps coming back to the idea of Romani Archaman and shying away again, all spooked horse versus anchored tether.

How many people is that, now, who seem to think — seem to have _grasped_ , Merlin corrects himself against the pull of the thorns in his chest — that Merlin has some not entirely antagonistic feelings about Romani? More than Merlin strictly likes. He doesn’t know how it happened. He swears he was a better liar than that, once upon a time.

It’s really not entirely comfortable.

Merlin knows what he _should_ do, what he’s known he should do since this whole thing started. Cut off contact; go back to only watching humans. Stop connecting with them. Will he go a little stir-crazy? Maybe. But this is a prison, not a vacation home. Anyway, it’s not like he’s been called a madman for nothing.

He doesn’t think, at this point, that he’ll be able to _not_ watch Chaldea, if he cuts off all contact. In that way, at least, Da Vinci actually _is_ doing him a favor. Her contact is a thread he can hang everything on, and deny himself the foolish rest.

It’s a wild whim that has him drawing his flower-computer into his lap again, picking up the internet and eyeballing the last exchange of messages between him and Da Vinci. She doesn’t _appear_ very online, but who knows. It’s been a few hours, and it’s not like she sleeps.  
  


**sagerose:** hey, Da Vinci  
 **sagerose:** why are you doing this, anyway? bothering about trying to get me to show up and talk to people?  
 **sagerose:** i can’t really make sense of it.  
  


He leaves it like that, teetering on the edge of the temptation to convince the servers it was all just a temporary computer hallucination. It’s a question it hasn’t really occurred to him to ask before, occupied as he’s been by the fact of the persistence and the annoyance of having to struggle free of attempts at friendship. But— he _is_ an annoyance. Merlin goes to great lengths to be inconvenient and offputting. Da Vinci is putting in a lot of effort for a lemon, and by all his figurings it doesn’t make sense.

She’s probably going to answer with something delightfully human.

Merlin minimizes the window and goes to read some hilariously wrong listicles instead. All the while he stays aware of the rose in his chest, the one that every so often clutches at a swelling heart; and of the one in Chaldea, dull and distant and distinctly lacking in fresh blood offerings. As it should be.

It’s another few hours of mindless distraction in the microcosms of human innovation before Da Vinci answers him.  
  


**ldavinci:** I really don’t think you understand how friendship works, Merlin.  
  


Yep, there’s the blithely, blindly human answer. Merlin wrinkles his nose at this and tabs away again, trying out the shapes of pithy nothings to throw back at her while he sorts through the archives of news made humorous.  
  


**ldavinci:** So! I will give you the remedial course.  
  


_Uh-oh_.  
  


**sagerose:** unsubscribe. unsubscribe!

**ldavinci:** A cute effort, but no.  
 **ldavinci:** First! It is one of the prevailing emotional theories of this century that different people express their affirming emotions in different ways. It’s not entirely wrong, either, although it’s certainly been commercialized to the moon and back.  
 **ldavinci:** Some people can’t say nice things to save their lives, but will demonstrate — let’s call it fondness — by staying nearby even in tough times, or by doing thoughtful things for those of whom they’re fond.  
 **ldavinci:** Let us review, shall we?  
 **ldavinci:** You helped keep Chaldea powered in the worst of times, thereby looking after the lives of all those here. You appeared in places you shouldn’t have been able to specifically to help, and have always come through when it counted. You helped us enforce a day off on Romani, to say nothing of the irreplaceable service of bringing him back.  
 **ldavinci:** By all accountings, although you’ve been obnoxious to a fault, you have cared for us all.  
 **ldavinci:** If this were a purely mercenary exchange, I would say I felt indebted. As things stand, is it so strange that more than one someone here might be grateful?  
  


The accounting of his deeds sinks heavy in him with every additional sentence he reads. Merlin finds himself shifting uncomfortably, shoulders coming up and hunching in.  
  


**sagerose:** keeping Chaldea safe was necessary for the survival of humanity and, oh, all of human history, remember.  
 **sagerose:** i’d be very bored and possibly die if humans went away forever.  
 **sagerose:** really, that’s just self-interest! don’t go reading anything into that.  
 **sagerose:** consider all services rendered paid for!  
  


He is not going to get off that easy, if he knows Da Vinci at all, but he has to try.  
  


**ldavinci:** I’m sure. And Romani?

**sagerose:** what about him?

**ldavinci:** Was bringing him back also necessary for the continuing safety of humanity at large?  
  


Oh. Right. Merlin grimaces. He caught himself out with that one, didn’t he? But it would have been irritating _not_ to.  
  


**sagerose:** maybe.  
 **sagerose:** anyway, it was boring! you were all so *sad* about it. and heroic sacrifices have been done to death and back again.  
 **sagerose:** haven’t you heard? happy endings are in vogue again.

**ldavinci:** Merlin.  
 **ldavinci:** I am looking very sternly in your general direction.  
  


Merlin confirms this for himself, finds a flat and uncompromising Da Vinci sat in front of her computer. He doesn’t know why he even bothered to look, he should have known she was telling the truth about that.

What does she expect, anyway? Something more honest teeters on the tip of Merlin’s tongue, the tips of his fingers, caught between the thorns and the petals.  
  


**ldavinci:** Do you think you’ll be judged, for caring?

**sagerose:** please, you’ve been judging me about everything else for months. as if i’d start caring about your judgment now.  
  


Merlin’s breath catches. Somehow his hands keep moving.  
  


**sagerose:** …it wasn’t fair, you know.  
 **sagerose:** i don’t think that man got to choose anything in his life.  
 **sagerose:** AND he tried to dump the title of Grand Caster off on me!  
 **sagerose:** but for all that, he didn’t abandon his responsibilities when it counted.  
 **sagerose:** i think most modern psychological practices hold you’re supposed to positively reinforce desired behavior, right? not punish it?  
 **sagerose:** …all this to say, it really was just selfishness.  
 **sagerose:** it’s not like i cared whether he wanted to live or not.  
 **sagerose:** you all would just be much less fun to watch if you kept being sad.  
  


There. That’s… something. Merlin even believes half of what he’s typed, rambling mess that it is. Honestly, can’t Da Vinci just take a gift at face value?  
  


**sagerose:** anyway, none of that translates back into you harassing me to visit.

**ldavinci:** Hmmm.  
  


He’s starting to hate it when she does that.  
  


**ldavinci:** Well, it’s like I said. I think it would be good for both of you, if you talked.

**sagerose:** pass, thanks.

**ldavinci:** And it’s very annoying to have a remote pen-pal. You could argue your case much more successfully if you were here.

**sagerose:** that was so transparent i don’t even think you were trying.

**ldavinci:** Mea culpa.  
 **ldavinci:** Merlin.  
 **ldavinci:** Actually, will you humor me and swing by my dreams? I’ll take a nap just for you.  
 **ldavinci:** No tricks, just a conversation.  
  


Merlin is pretty sure she has tricks up her sleeves at all times, but he’s almost curious. Almost.  
  


**sagerose:** what’s in it for me?

**ldavinci:** I will give you a full twenty-four hours of no instant messages initiated by me, how’s that?  
  


That she can bribe him with her absence feels kind of heavy and low, actually; and what’s more it surprises Merlin that it does, when put so bluntly. How strange. What _do_ his emotions think they’re doing? The ones that don’t exist, specifically.  
  


**sagerose:** fiiiiine. time starts when you wake up.

**ldavinci:** Deal. I’ll be asleep in fifteen minutes.

**sagerose:** see you then.  
  


Da Vinci’s dreams are strange tonight — today — whenever in time and space it is. Merlin finds her not in the streets of Renaissance Italy, nor a busy Chaldean workshop, but amid rocks and a wind that blows and blows; he has to hike up a narrow mountain trail apparently made by goats in order to get to her in the first place. When she comes into view she’s perched on the tallest possible point, stone that shouldn’t at all sustain her balance, and her head is tilted skyward. The wind picks up her hair, and the birds overhead are a shiver of wingbeats amidst the chill gusts.

Something is definitely strange here, Merlin concludes, and climbs the rest of the way up to her. Beside Da Vinci’s perch is a little flat space like a landing, dirt and scrub and a sheer drop below, and Merlin elects to be glad he doesn’t have an issue with heights.

Sound behind him makes Da Vinci look over. She waves fingers at him in greeting, then looks past him and frowns faintly. “What is that?”

Merlin squeezes his eyes shut for several agonizing seconds and hopes for mercy, even knowing none will be forthcoming. Then he squares himself and turns to look over his shoulder.

A sheep with four horns and a golden bell around its neck stops where it is, baas at him, and lowers its head to nibble on the truly pathetic scrub.

“Punishment for my sins,” Merlin says with a wry despair, and turns his back on it. This was the wrong move, it transpires. An offended sheep moves very quickly indeed, and the sudden shove of horns against his backside almost jars him off the mountain entirely. “Ow! Truthfully, don’t worry about it, it’s mine.”

Da Vinci does not look impressed by this either. Merlin suspects he’ll have to go to greater lengths than any living mage has to impress her.

Not that he cares, he reminds himself.

“As long as it only headbutts you, I suppose,” she decides, and her mouth curves a cheerfully wicked smile. “Although, speaking of sins! I always was curious.” A pause. “Well, curious when I studied the stories of you, at least. And it struck me when Mash was reviewing your stories as well, that many of the sources considered preeminent in the field speak of your imprisonment as penance for your sins.”

Merlin stares blankly at her. “…and?” he says, encouraging only because he can’t think of a way to turn the topic aside that won’t be blatant and therefore dismissed instantly.

“And most of the writings we have on the topic of you are from the twelfth century or later,” Da Vinci goes on, a little impatiently. The wind remains brisk. A quick check behind Merlin reveals that his ridealong ungulate has opted to go back to picking scrub out of stone. For now. “But, correct me if I’m wrong, you’re from something more like the sixth. Possibly older?”

“I’m also sometimes conflated with a few other figures from that period,” Merlin says, with an attitude like he’s helping. He honestly isn’t looking forward to the Throne, if it ever happens that he dies. He’s likely to have some of those identities shoved on him. “You can tell the difference because, while I’m _from_ Dyfed technically, I was never a king. I just borrowed my name from one a long time ago. You’re right that I’m older than the era of King Arthur, though. …Ah, it’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I don’t remember the exact year.”

“Never mind that,” Da Vinci says, waving it off. There’s something sparking and curious about her eyes as she leans forward, peering at him. “It strikes me that you probably hail from before Christianity was quite so prevalent in the British Isles, yes?”

“Where are you going with this?” Merlin wants to know. Because she really isn’t making a lot of sense with this sudden derailment. He’d thought he was going to get harangued about friendship, not quizzed on his past. Unless this is a secret friendship ploy designed to lure him into defending a different front, and then get suckered when he least expects it? Entirely possible. He eyes Da Vinci as if she might be concealing a weapon.

“I was thinking, for the most part, that sin is an aggressively religious way to phrase the whole thing,” she says primly, folding her fingers together and lacing them over one knee. “So I wondered if that was _your_ wording, or folded in with the tellings from the thirteenth century and so on. You don’t strike me as a religious man.”

“I’m not,” Merlin says with a shrug. If he had to be called _something_ it would probably be pagan, but it’s hard to be any kind of religious — at least for him — when he knows the shape of the world, and where the Root lies under it all. “I should think that’s clear enough. I’m a cambion, after all.”

“There’s nothing saying demons can’t find religion.” Da Vinci’s chin tilts and her tone is downright lofty. “All right, well, that’s one question answered. Or not at all.”

To be fair, Merlin has not been especially subtle about his dodges. “I’m really struggling to see what all this is about,” he says conversationally. “If you don’t need me…”

“Go anywhere and I won’t regard that you’ve fulfilled our exchange, such as it is.” Da Vinci delivers her threat with a perfectly sweet voice. “Anyway! What I was getting at is that the stories are divided on whether you took _yourself_ out of the world, or whether the Lady of the Lake did that to you. Not many people are in a position to ask the primary source, after all. Thomas Malory certainly wasn’t.”

“I’m going to demand clearer terms before I answer anything.” Merlin folds his arms, hiding his hands away in his sleeves; the sheep has progressed to about even with him, and looks like it might be considering his robe again, so he needs to keep an eye on that while he’s here. “Otherwise you might pin me here to answer your questions for days.”

She smiles cheerfully at him, unoffended. “Would I do such a thing?”

“Almost certainly,” he says, and takes a very small step to the left, away from the sheep. “Terms, Leonardo.”

“Hmmm.” Da Vinci taps her chin thoughtfully. “Three questions sounds traditional, don’t you think? Answer three questions for me, I shall say nothing of the answers to anyone else, delighting in being the only person manifested in the human world to know these things, and I’ll leave you be for at least twenty-four hours.”

“Two,” Merlin offers.

“Four,” she says by way of counteroffer.

“That’s not how haggling _works_ ,” Merlin mutters, eyeing her sidelong again. She actually does have leverage in that the continual sound is deeply, deeply annoying; that will only last until he can find a proper workaround or root the entire script out. Maybe he can remove the lower flower with some carefully prehensile branches. He keeps meaning to do either of those things and not actually doing them. “Fine, three; but I’m entitled to take you very literally.”

“I’d expect nothing less.” Da Vinci unfolds herself, steps daintily down from the rock she’s on, and gestures ahead of them. It’s empty air at first, just sky and void, but then a path forms out of clouds. She steps fearlessly out onto it, turns, beckons to him. “So! Did you imprison yourself, or was it the Lady of the Lake?”

Merlin reminds himself of peace, blessed quiet in the tower, and steps out onto the clouds after her. They give ever so slightly under his feet, like spongy earth rich with recent rainfall. “It’s not as simple an answer as that,” he says. A soft set of sounds behind him says, probably, that the sheep is following. Good, it should feel right at home.

“Then elaborate,” Da Vinci says, merciless.

_Ugh_. “Viviane set the trap.” It’s the easiest answer, but Merlin in his stalling chatter has literally _just_ told Da Vinci it wasn’t that easy. Why did he do that. “…I suppose, when it comes down to it, I saw it coming and didn’t bother not to walk into it.”

“Interesting.” Da Vinci draws the word out as she leads them along, spinning path before them up, and up, out of clouds that look increasingly more like cotton candy as the sky changes colors. “That certainly creates some leading implications about your situation.”

Merlin bites his tongue on asking _like what_. “I haven’t been able to break out permanently,” he says instead. “It’s wise not to underestimate women or faeries. Or, in point of fact, angry fae women.”

“Mmhm.” Da Vinci whistles a few notes. Before long, they’re joined by birds, ranging in size and color and physical possibility. “I’m not convinced you’ve learned that lesson, if we’re honest.”

He shrugs it off. He’s sure he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, except that it’s almost certainly a veiled threat. “It is what it is. Anyway, it’s not like it’s _torture_. Avalon’s nice. The weather’s always good, and it’s not like I actually need to go anywhere physically to visit people.”

At least for the space of those moments, Merlin earnestly believes it. Who would turn down paradise, after all? Cath Palug had some very justifiable reasons for being angry with him, even if it was for the best in the end.

“That’s true,” Da Vinci muses. “What was it Romani called you? A magic telescope?”

“Yep, that’s me!” Merlin agrees. It sure was among the list of imprecations that had been exchanged in the forest in Babylonia. It’s not like he’s offended; it’s a lot better that everyone forgets the span of his vision. And, judging by her intonation, she has definitely slipped up, so he can’t at _all_ be displeased with the outcome. “That’s question two, by the way, and I’m going to be generous and not count it as second _and_ third.”

Da Vinci makes a quiet hissing sound under her breath. “Damn. I suppose you did warn me.”

“I sure did.” Merlin pauses in the path, bends to touch the clouds curiously. There’s definitely presence to them, more than a standard cloud. They feel, in fact, somewhere between ice cream and a beanbag. He’s kind of enchanted with the product of Da Vinci’s imagination, but he’s not telling her that until he’s safely out of range of further bribe-mail. “I _will_ , however, elaborate on Viviane’s motivations for free. We were lovers once, it’s true, but we both understood that was not going to turn into anything romantic. You know, my limitations on attachments and all.”

“Mmhm.” Da Vinci’s acknowledgment does not at all sound like she believes him.

Merlin sighs to himself. It’s deeply frustrating to be seen like that. No wonder people hate clairvoyants. “Anyway, the part people forget more often is that she adopted and raised Lancelot. The _du Lac_ part of his name isn’t for show, you know. …she was a lot angrier about the things that happened to him than anything else.”

“So that’s why you didn’t argue too hard with the trap she set.” Da Vinci makes a knowing sort of a sound. “I had suspected you were carrying a backpack full of guilt, and that hasn’t really dissuaded me. You know, of course, that guilt wouldn’t happen if you weren’t at all attached to people.”

“Are you going to ask your last question or not?” Merlin is sorely tempted to just turn around now and damn the consequences anyway, if she keeps talking like this. It’s hard to ignore, and his chest keeps hurting for a variety of reasons, and behind him he can _still hear hoof-thumps_.

“I’m considering it,” she says, as the sky fades through pink to violet. “I hadn’t even gotten around to part two of the lecture on friendship, where we talk about reciprocity, burdens of care, self-sabotage, and the boundaries where ignoring consent in the name of preventing self-destruction lie— Merlin!”

Merlin has, in point of fact, turned around to walk away, brushing past the sheep to do it and nearly spoiling the exit as his robe catches on its horns. He has so, so many better things to do than this. …Better things to do that he can’t think of what they are, but he’ll think of them, because anything in the tower is better than another minute of Da Vinci aggressively extolling the virtues of friendship at him. Honestly, what did she _think_ would happen?

She catches up to him quickly, probably through cheating with clouds, and builds the path out so she can match his pace. “All right, all right,” she says. “I’ll put it down. There really was one more thing I wanted to tell you on a different topic.”

Merlin pauses. Eyes her sidelong again. “One more thing,” he says, ignoring that technically she has one question left. She said tell, not ask, but she might slip up in the intervening time.

There’s something in Da Vinci’s look that worries him, but he can’t quite parse the expression out into an actual mood; just that there’s something inscrutable there, something more than he understands and probably some kind of evil plot. “I talked to Romani today,” she says, and Merlin tenses as she goes blithely onward. “He asked after you.”

Heart and gut attempt to seize at once, and Merlin stumbles as he takes his next step on the clouds. He stops himself, stands still in an effort to reduce the number of moving pieces involved with the process of walking. “Why would he possibly be asking after me?” It doesn’t make sense. Wait, maybe it was about the Magi*Mari thing.

Da Vinci comes to a stop to match him. Merlin notes that she appears to be of a height with him now, flicks his eyes down to check— yep, she’s standing on a block of clouds to maximize her ability to look him in the eye and stare him down.

She could just make herself taller. Humans are like that, aren’t they.

“You were a fluorescent pink shadow in the command room for quite a while,” Da Vinci says. “People noticed. Much of Chaldea is aware of what you did, in part if not in whole. I didn’t have to _tell_ Romani anything— he heard talk from others of the staff, and asked me to tell him the whole thing.” Her smile turns sweetly indulgent. “Don’t worry. I didn’t tell him you might have any kind of _attachment_ to him. I just told him what you did, and let him draw his own conclusions from that.”

The sheep makes itself known again by leaning heavily against the back of Merlin’s legs. He has to push back against it in order to stay standing, which is probably for the best. “You could have left well enough alone,” Merlin mutters, feeling sullen and knowing it’s showing.

It’s not like he’d expected to go completely unnoticed. He’d known when he projected himself in Chaldea that people saw him, that he would be remarked upon if not remembered. But— why this, the measured accounting of his deeds given out freely by Da Vinci to anyone who asks? It’s hardly heroics, it’s definitely not anything worth telling tales about. Merlin has to stop himself from rubbing at his chest and the thorn-sharp aching underneath.

“I could have,” she says. “Why would I? You helped us all. Romani is… part of Chaldea, to say the least. It’s a service no one will soon forget. If that still bothers you, say it’s the artist’s attachment to proper attribution.”

Merlin chokes on a startled laugh. It’s the last justification he’d expected — less than that, even, since it hadn’t been on his list of expectations at all. “How am I to argue with that?” He really doesn’t have a way to. And— maybe doesn’t want to. Maybe.

“You’re not,” Da Vinci says, and recedes back to her normal height, gestures along the path back to the mountain. “I also haven’t mentioned we’re still in touch. I’ll keep your confidence — but I reserve the right to be pushy about how ridiculous you’re being sometimes.”

A mixed bag, but honestly, out of this conversation, Merlin could have done worse. He stands there several moments longer, linking his hands behind his back to prevent further rubbing at his chest; then he sets himself along the path the way she gestures, boot-heels sinking into the clouds just enough to be springy. Soft sounds behind tell him the sheep still follows.

That little jerk.

“Thank you,” Merlin says, finally, and sighs immediately after, because it’s the right thing to do but Da Vinci’s going to read into it. He puts his feet back on solid stone, more or less.

Da Vinci beams back at him. “That’s what friends are for.”

They’re not.

Merlin can’t seem to make the words out loud, though, so he bites his tongue and frowns impotently at her. This sternness has absolutely no effect on her cheerful smile, more’s the pity. “Was that everything?”

“Pretty much,” she says. “Unless you wanted to stay and go flying.”

His mouth turns up despite himself. “Not this time.” But maybe another, he thinks, and is astonished to find as he considers the idea that it’s not wholly out of the question. _Weird_.

Da Vinci flaps her hand at him in a shooing gesture. “Take care, then. I’ll keep you posted. — Oh, I almost forgot. Last question.”

Halfway through a step out of dreams, blurring boundaries, Merlin hesitates. He could rules-lawyer her out of it, but he kind of wants to know what she wants.

She takes it as assent, plunges ahead. “What’s that in your chest?”

Startled, Merlin looks down. He’s been so carefully avoiding touching it that he hasn’t felt it — all this while, the rose has been there, crimson perfect traitor advertising his issues to the world. He recoils with his entire body, and one hand comes up to try to press it back into his chest.

Nothing. It refuses to move. Da Vinci tilts her head at him.

“Foolishness,” Merlin grates out, and flings himself back into physicality in the tower before anything _else_ can happen.


	7. rootbound

Nothing else does happen.

When he stops in on his own subconscious, the sheep is still there, more or less minding its own business, though it gives him reproachful looks every so often, especially when he pokes and prods at it to try to figure out what it is. Once Merlin catches his inner self hanging out with it, but not in any kind of a plotting way — just leaning back with his head against the sheep’s fluffy side, looking up at the sky. Irrationally Merlin feels jealous — _he can’t be jealous of himself, that’s stupid_. But he doesn’t join them, either. It doesn’t feel right.

At least he’s stopped being afraid of that inner self, although he’s not sure the rest is an improvement.

The length of his stone room remains the same. Merlin coaxes vined flowers down the side of the tower to try to compost, consume, or retrieve the computer-flower below. He doesn’t _quite_ experience success, but he does manage to shift it at least a little, reassuring him that if he does wind up needing to fully cut ties before he can work out Da Vinci’s script, he won’t be stuck with eternal distant chiming to knife him in the heart.

He keeps double-checking that his chest is flat and not growing a flower after all. That part of his dreams hasn’t translated into the waking world, mercifully; but he keeps wanting what can’t be had.

Unless…

Unless.

“Stop that,” Merlin murmurs to his heart, and presses it all back down again, thorny and true.

He tries not to stare at the inscription over the door, but that winds up getting some several moments of its own anyway before Merlin can drag himself back to flowers. He thought he’d stopped contemplating that years ago.

Only the innocent may pass; and Merlin has been many things, but innocent left him hundreds of years ago. It’s pointless to think about.

Time keeps rolling, one way or another. True to her word, Da Vinci gives him a break, and Merlin folds some of the rawness she’d managed to strike away where it won’t be quite as visible. He thinks. Hopefully. The only way to test that is to put himself in a position where it might be seen, and he doesn’t really feel like doing that either.

It’s definitely at least a day, maybe more but probably not less, before Da Vinci does contact him again, and Merlin finds he feels pleased before annoyed.  
  


**ldavinci:** Haircut complete! We trimmed him up yesterday.  
**ldavinci:** It looks very good, if I do say so myself.  
**ldavinci:** Although there was an odd complication.

**sagerose:** since you’re very clearly waiting for me to ask, i’ll bite. what went wrong?

**ldavinci:** Well, not wrong per se.  
**ldavinci:** The braid that he wears over his shoulder won’t cut. The blades turned aside when I tried.  
**ldavinci:** Only that portion, though. I don’t suppose you happen to know anything about that?  
  


Merlin thinks of the young Solomon, of the severed braid offered with all its weight of memory and truth. How it had retained that shape even taken out of the dream, unsettlingly real in Merlin’s hands. The assurance in Solomon’s statement: you have everything you need. Merlin shivers with the memory, the vivid impact of it hitting him all over again, and before he can stop himself he looks for Solomon, for Romani. Just to assure himself of—

No, not really. Just because he wants to.

There are copper highlights in the snowfall of his hair, even bound up in a tail as it is; he looks like he’s somewhere between the two shapes of himself, and though the king has clearly won for coloring, the smile is one Merlin wonders if Solomon ever wore.

To be fair, King Solomon never had to deal with aggressively adorable teenaged girls having a ball playing with his hair.

Merlin watches for longer than he should, and is only in fact drawn away to the computer in front of him by the repeated chimes signifying he’s taken too long to answer Da Vinci. His heart aches; he appreciates her help, even if she doesn’t know she’s given it in precisely this way.  
  


**sagerose:** i have a few theories, but nothing grounded enough to be worth going into.  
**sagerose:** call it an anchor point and leave it at that for now.

**ldavinci:** Hmm. I’ll ask you another time, then.  
  


Ah, there’s the irritation he’d been missing earlier.  
  


**sagerose:** i take it you’re planning to keep bothering me.

**ldavinci:** Of course!  
**ldavinci:** You didn’t think you were going to get off free just because Romani’s settling back in and smiling properly again, did you?

**sagerose:** of course not.  
  


What _had_ he been thinking, anyway. Merlin frowns, kneads absently at his chest. He hasn’t really thought— what’s his end goal, here? Does he have one? This holding pattern of Da Vinci trying to be penpals with him, and the yearning that’s stuck with him even to the edge of paradise, what are the possible exit conditions?

Well, either he manages to cut ties somehow and gives up this — banter and friendly knowledge of each other and the lingering stupid hope of anything at all that involves Romani Archaman — or he gives up on staying distant, manifests himself in Chaldea and lets its living people worm their way into his heart until they die. Maybe it would be…

He already knows it would be disastrous to lose, but maybe if he stocks up on good times he can armor himself against the inevitable pain.

Or, option three, no exit: just maintaining like this, trapped and not even trying, watching without participating, feeling without acting. Neither one, nor the other; no possible conclusion, until… well, until the mortal ones die anyway.

Merlin frowns at that, shifting some of his mental accounting around. The half-existence really isn’t going to be rewarding at all — it’s all the drawbacks of cleaving to Chaldea with none of the benefits. Annoying. He might actually have to choose, and he still doesn’t know which one he’d pick. Probably because of the rose, and Merlin’s hilariously rash decision to embed it into the self of his dreams.

He’s really made every single one of his own messes.

—ah, Da Vinci’s still typing.  
  


**ldavinci:** I’m glad you have that much common sense, at least.  
**ldavinci:** Also, keep in mind that as you’re doubtless trying to develop ways around my little script friend, I am simultaneously developing upgrades and other workarounds.

**sagerose:** why, for goodness’ sake?  
**sagerose:** why do you possibly want a friend you have to corner and blackmail and threaten into friendship?

**ldavinci:** Oh, Merlin.  
**ldavinci:** I’m not blackmailing you into friendship, I’m blackmailing you into not self-isolating.  
**ldavinci:** Think of it as a coping strategy, while you learn to do it for yourself.

**sagerose:** why???  
**sagerose:** it’s better all around this way!  
**sagerose:** you don’t make any  
**sagerose:** why are you  
**sagerose:** what’s *wrong* with you?

**ldavinci:** Humanity, I suspect.  
**ldavinci:** We ever have done the foolish things in service of each other.  
**ldavinci:** And however much you go on about how being a cambion means you’re not like us, half-incubus means half-human, also.  
**ldavinci:** So, Merlin, I need you to know, from the bottom of my heart.  
**ldavinci:** You’re being a dumbass. And I, and Chaldea, will continue to be here.  
**ldavinci:** That’s all for now! Ciao~ ☆  
  


Merlin regrets asking any of the questions he just asked, honestly.

In fact, the only reason this flower hasn’t also gone out the window is shaky hands and a bare modicum of self-preservation. He’d just have the same problem as before.

Da Vinci’s words almost hurt to look at.

Merlin drags his hand across the projected letters at random, sends that keysmash to shut the script up before it can get ideas, and walks away from the computer to hunker down on the other side of the room. He draws his knees up to his chest, rests his chin on them and wraps his arms around his shins. If it’s childish, who’s to tell on him? No one’s here to see. No one ever will be. Besides, his heart keeps aching, somewhere between miserable and homesick, and this helps a little, with the pressure at his chest.

He could toss himself back into his dreams, but there lies the sheep and the rawer self and all of the things he’s also running away from, within as it is without. Merlin laughs sharply to himself at the sheer irony: imprisoned in the same cell for hundreds of years and he’s _running away_.

He really does have to pick one and stick to it, doesn’t he. If he’s going to cut them off, it’s going to have to be now. Before very much longer, he thinks, he won’t have the willpower to. Somewhere between that flash of earnestly giggling teenagers and longsuffering doctor, and Da Vinci’s firmly stubborn words, Merlin wants so badly it hurts.

He runs down the list of reasons why not once more, a litany so well-known by now it might as well be a prayer.

Chaldea itself is fine and nothing is about to end the world. Probably.

The humans will have a natural human lifespan. Eighty years at _most_ before they start dying. If Merlin does this, he’ll inevitably lose a great deal, and it will hurt as long as there are humans to watch.

Even Da Vinci can’t remain in this world forever, surely.

Who knows how long Merlin can bend the terms of his prison into parole? It’s best done sparingly. One day it may snap shut on him. Freedom should be savored in bites, not lived in.

And as for Romani himself, well. What Merlin wants is pretty much an idea, anyway, and the good doctor never has seemed to like Merlin all that much. Probably doubly so after finding out Merlin is also Magi*Mari.

And besides all that, as if that much wasn’t enough already, Merlin makes a terrible friend. He lets people die _all the time_. No one would really be getting anything out of it if he showed up in Chaldea. Yes. This is better. He puts his forehead down on his knees instead, surprised to find his eyes are wet, and breathes.

Every time he thinks he’s convinced himself to walk away, he becomes intimately aware of the rose wrapped around his heart all over again, gripping thorns and twining roots, something that grows and searches for the sun as long as it lives. And then he stops, and goes back to the beginning again, reminds himself _why not_. Vaguely he’s conscious that this is actually a bad loop to be in, and it might be nice if Da Vinci _did_ say something to annoy him and break the cycle of self-recrimination into petty bantering again…

Oh. Oh, no.

They’re _friends_.

_Fuck_.

What drags Merlin out of the daze of painful indecision finally isn’t her, even. It’s a sound effect, and it’s from the computer; but it’s the notification he had set up to tell him when there was something in Magi*Mari’s private inbox. It had been pretty important to answer Romani right away, after all!

Now Merlin lifts his head and stares at the computer-flower and the glowing icon over it with some sort of horror. That’s Romani, isn’t it.

He’s doomed either way.

He doesn’t have to read it, Merlin rationalizes. He can just let it die in the inbox.

But he wants to know…

Well, it’s not like there are read receipts. Romani doesn’t ever have to know that Merlin’s read what he wrote.

If it even is Romani. Maybe it’s a different fan! Who… stumbled into the private inbox Merlin pretty much blocked anyone but Romani from ever using. Yeah. Hm.

His heart does something fast and jumpy all the while. Merlin, sensing that this is a losing battle with himself, unfolds and paces the scant distance back to the computer again. Internet. Website. Forum. Inbox… ah. yes. It’s from archromance.

Now that he’s seen the message, he can’t very well not open it.

**From:** archromance  
**Subject:** getting back in touch

>i know it’s you, Merlin, okay?  
>you still check this, don’t you? i mean, i checked the dates— it might have been a little while, but Magi*Mari’s definitely been active since i um. left.  
>Leonardo told me what you did for me.  
>i wanted to thank you.  
>anyway, can we talk? please?  
>there are other things i want to say…  
>it’s important.  
>i don’t know why you left so fast, but i’m not angry or anything, if that’s it. about you being Magi*Mari, i mean. i mean, it was weird, but i get it. i think. and what you said back then…  
>it mattered.  
>i guess that’s it.  
>please let me know.  
>-Romani  
  


Very carefully, Merlin puts the computer down and moves away from it again. Reading that was… probably a mistake. It’s an outstretched hand, clear as day, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. The pull in his chest says to take it, to _answer_ if nothing else. The weightier cynicism of his sense for avoiding further pain says this is the perfect opportunity for a clean cut. And in between, he could just… say nothing. Nothing at all.

He paces. He chews on the inside of his cheek. He coaxes different flowers in through the window. For a while he winds up on the floor, an indecisive puddle of robes and rainbows. The simplest form of the argument is: he shouldn’t, but he really, really wants to.

And he can’t postpone answering forever. Eventually, Da Vinci will ping him again, and probably if Merlin puts off Romani too long he’ll hear about it _that_ way. If nothing else, he can at least put off the decision until the moment is forced…

It’s not going to be any better that way.

_it mattered_ , Romani says, and, _there are other things i want to say_.

Hope enough to hang himself with.

Merlin sprawls out on the floor, and for the moment chooses nothing at all; but the rose in his chest still aches and clutches, and vaguely, distantly, he’s reminded of how _tenacious_ wild roses can be. The cultivated kind, sure, some of them keel over as soon as a breath of frost looks at them the wrong way. Years of careful breeding for pretty without concern for steadiness. But the wild roses, the ones that have survived winter after winter, those don’t particularly care when the cold snaps.

They grow, and grow, and grow.

And here Merlin is, rambler gone rootbound and paralyzed with it all, the wild growth only strangling his heart. He presses his cheek to the stone and thinks of things he can’t have, indulges in the masochism of it all, and gets absolutely nowhere but the floor. 

Bad manners, shoving his choices off on someone else like that. Merlin doesn’t have anything else, only this: wild roses and hope caught in the thorns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   * Further chapter titles can also be attributed to _Growing Things_ , from the Shook Twins.
>   * Yes, I'm leaving it there. In my defense, we know exactly where we're going next. Have hope!
>   * I'm continually aware that I tend to play a little fast and loose with Fate/ canon. I'm happy to talk about my worldbuilding choices and changes if you're curious, though! I enjoy talking about the creative process.
>   * Thank you for your patience, all! It's been a delight to see how into this everyone's gotten.
>   * ...I do hope y'all are into slow burns, though. I mean, you're here, right? ; ) 
>   * i've tried to format the chat sections as clearly and distinctly as possible, keeping them legible without being super textblocks; let me know if any of that doesn't work for you and I'll see what i can do.
>   * Sometimes you gotta do some pruning or transplanting before your plants will grow healthy again.
> 



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